Perhaps this is slightly heretical, but I did a little dance in my seat when I found out that Brian Wilson's been called in by George Gershwin's estate to complete and record some of the great songwriter's unfinished material. I love Brian Wilson. I may even love him more than any of the Beatles, which I realize may be a controversial assessment. But SMiLE, along with Cee-Lo Green...Is The Soul Machine was the album of my college years, and for good reason. SMiLE is a strange album, no denying it: it's got everything from "Vega-Tables," which feels like a children's song in the vein of "Country Feeling" to the alternate version of "Good Vibrations," which I love:
This version of the song is so much more explicitly about the psychology of attraction and flirtation than the somewhat sweeter and more common version: "I love the colorful clothes she wears / And she's already working on my brain / Ah, I only looked in her eyes / But I picked up something I just can't explain....Ah, I bet I know what she's like / And I can feel how right she'd be for me / It's weird how she comes in so strong / And I wonder what she's picking up from me." But of course, I'm meandering off track, too far from the gloriousness of "In Blue Hawaii":
All of which is a way of saying that Brian Wilson does such lovely, such inherently American work. The middle section of "In Blue Hawaii" sounds exactly to me what updated Gershwin might be like, taking the melancholy of the early song and punching it up with what sounds like a little doo-wop influence left over from the Beach Boys' surfing days. It could be just that I'm excited that there will be more Brian Wilson, but I think this project is very well-suited to his talents. No way I would have been smart enough to put Wilson and Gershwin together, but I'm glad the Gershwin estate was.