More on That Lucky Old Sun

I've not written anything about music in far too long - other commitments (mostly work, but also my course, the book I'm working on and my comic blogging) have kept me from it. And now, when I'm starting to blog about music again, it's about the same thing I wrote about six months ago, That Lucky Old Sun.

It's strongly rumoured that this album will never be finished, and if it isn't that's one of the biggest crimes I can imagine. Even in the unfinished forms in which we have it, it's a minor masterpiece. The rave reviews I wrote six months ago when the album first came out were a little hyperbolic - I was writing those after only one hearing, and that hearing was at the live premiere of the piece. Given that I'd gone into it merely hoping that it would be OK, hearing it and discovering it was really good was enough to start me raving.

I was going to wait til the actual album release to do a more balanced appraisal of the music, but given that that may never happen, and that I've recently managed to obtain a copy of the demos (no, I'm not sharing these publicly - I don't want to even give the appearance of eroding the market for this) , as well as having had an audience recording of the gig I attended since a couple of days afterwards, I thought I'd do my best to cover the album in the only forms in which it currently exists.

There's been some debate as to how much of the album is Brian Wilson's work. as there was with his 2004 completion of Smile. While I don't claim to be a party to the process by which those things were put together, it's common knowledge that Darian Sahanaja (the Billy Strayhorn to Wilson's Duke Ellington) helped stitch together Smile and that woodwind player Paul Mertens wrote the orchestrations for it. In the same way, keyboardist Scott Bennet (whose contributions I ignored in my earlier review, because he wasn't credited in the publicity I'd seen) wrote at least some of the lyrics for That Lucky Old Sun, as did Van Dyke Parks, Mertens provided the orchestrations, and I would be very surprised if Sahanaja didn't also help pull the pieces together. Many people (usually those who want to believe a myth of Wilson as a brain-damaged vegetable controlled by Machiavellians around him, rather than the doubtless more complicated and nuanced reality) have claimed that Wilson had little or nothing to do with this work.

But at the same time, as with Smile, this sounds to me like a Brian Wilson record, and my guess is it's at least as much his work as any of the Beach Boys albums for which he's famous. He had collaborators then, too - his band, the session musicians, the lyricists with whom he worked. But the thing that convinces me more than anything that it's mostly his work is that, both in the live performances and even more so on the demos, he sounds in better voice than he has in decades.

Since at least the mid-70s, Brian Wilson has been a notoriously patchy vocalist, who can sound flat and unenthused, almost robotic, a lot of the time. He only gives a good performance when he's really enthused by the material, and here he's singing strongly and enthusiastically. It sounds like Brian Wilson.

Having said that, as I go through the songs I'm going to attempt to guess who contributed what. Without any information from the participants themselves, I can only go by my knowledge of their styles, so I'll almost certainly get things comically wrong. In particular I'll almost certainly underrate Scott Bennet's contributions - Brian Wilson is probably my favourite living songwriter, Van Dyke Parks is both a personal favourite of mine and one of the most truly decent people I've ever had the pleasure to have (all-too-brief) contact with, while I'm not really familliar with Bennet's work. But I'll try anyway. If anyone has any actual knowledge (rather than unfounded speculation like my own) please let me know.

In a way, this album infuriates me, in that Brian Wilson has made the album my band, The National Pep, were talking about making last year, except he's done it much better than we could. While the phrase 'rock and roll' comes up over and over again in the course of the album, in fact much of this hearkens back to pre-rock popular music. The big influences here aren't Phil Spector or Chuck Berry, though both show up round the edges, but George Gershwin and Stephen Foster. More than anything, it reminds me of Orange Crate Art, the collection of Van Dyke Parks songs that Wilson sang lead on in 1995, and like that album it's a celebration of California, but not just the sun and girls California of the early Beach Boys music, but the real place. It can really be seen as the third part of a trilogy of which Smile and Orange Crate Art are parts one and two.

Going through this, I'll be referring to the demos and the live performances interchangeably, except where I note one or other specifically. Both are needed, really, to have an idea of how the finished album would sound. The live performances contain sections that were obviously written after the demos were recorded, short extra linking passages or instrumental sections, and have much fuller arrangements (much of the demos are keyboard and vocals only, while the live performances were by a ten piece band and eight-piece string & horn section), but are (at least in the versions I have) poor recording quality, and Brian often mumbles the lyrics. The demos, on the other hand, are much simpler but also much clearer.

The album starts with That Lucky Old Sun. Oddly, this had never really been a song I'd paid attention to prior to this album bringing it to my attention, but it's one that I should have noticed, as I'd heard it enough times - I have versions by Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong and probably half a dozen others. Wilson takes the song apart, completely rewriting the chord sequence and turning it into a rewrite of Ol' Man River. The version here is very abbreviated, just the first verse, before going into a gospel flavoured chorus of 'ooh mama yama glory hallelujah', a phrase which Brian first mentioned wanting to use in a song in an interview in the mid-1970s. All through the album we find little pieces like this - ideas he'd mentioned, or we'd heard in little snippets on demos, brought back and thrown into the mix.

After this we have Morning Beat. Based around the Shortenin' Bread riff Brian has used so many times, this is reminiscent of City Blues from his last album of new material, Gettin' In Over My Head, except it's actually good, sounding something like a non-ironic I Love LA before swerving into a clip-clop country ballad middle sectiom which references Kurt Weill's September Song. It's indicative of the depth of the material here, incidentally, that even this trivial, fluffy opener has by my count four separate melodic ideas (the bluesy verse, the middle section (which is itself as twisty as something like This Whole World), the ooh mow mamas and the short stop-start 'I listen to the morning beat' section). This album is almost fractally detailed, the melodies seeming comfortingly familliar but always going somewhere slightly unexpected.

After a brief narrative section (one of several spoken sections written by Parks, all describing the city of LA), the album goes into Good Kind Of Love,a bouncy pop song with the slightly-swung beat and staccatto piano chords that people think of as characteristic of middle-period Beach Boys but that are actually more like Paul McCartney. Lyrically, it reminds me of Friends Of Mine by The Zombies, a celebration of two other people's love, and once again it has a section that just goes in a completely different direction (the section beginning "the sun keeps on shining" which ties into the main themes of the album and builds up to a thick gospel sound for a couple of lines), but what really stands out here is Paul Mertens' orchestrations.

Mertens has never really been given the credit he deserves for his string and horn parts on Wilson's recent albums, but he's got a very distinct, unique voice as an arranger that makes his charts sound very different from anything else Wilson has done. I suspect part of the reason he's not more admired is that as a performer he's patchy - he does a great King Curtis honk, and his bass harmonica is wonderful, but when given a solo on a ballad he wanders dangerously into the territory of Kenny G or new age - but his arrangements add a totally new tonal colour to Wilson's palette. They sound a lot like Van Dyke Parks' work (when I first heard the completed Smile I assumed it was Parks who had done the strings) but with a more European flavour - I swear I can hear Kurt Weill and Bartok both in there.

Here he outdoes himself. While the arrangement for the band itself (presumably either Wilson or Sahanaja's work, probably the former) is excellent, playing a lot with the colours of different instruments and the dynamics of the band, Mertens combines George Martin-esque strings on the slow sections with skittering Stephane Grappelli-esque violin, big band horns and a simple but effective woodwind countermelody (unfortunately the quality of the audience recordings doesn't let me hear what woodwind Mertens is playing - I think clarinet, but it could be anything in a low register).

The whole song reminds me of You Touched Me from Gettin' In Over My Head, but much better thought out, with much more different sections and better lyrics. It's like an expansion on and refinement of the earlier song, which I enjoyed for itself anyway.

Forever My Surfer Girl is one of the weaker songs, and one where I could believe that someone other than Wilson wrote the bulk of the music - there are three ballads on here that just don't sound very much like Wilson's work, so I'm happy to give Scott Bennet credit for the bulk of the work on those (which is not to say that Wilson didn't contribute - but in any songwriting partnership the initial idea for a song can be brought in by either party, and I suspect those were Bennet's initial ideas). I could be wrong of course, and I certainly wouldn't put money on it, but on the other hand these are definitely Bennet's lyrics, and musically it does sound like some of his solo material.

It's also the first song to explicitly reference Wilson's earlier work and life, not only in the title but in the opening lines ("summer of 61/a goddess became my song") and I may well be less enthused about this song just because those two lines make explicit something I have always found implicit in Wilson's work, and I don't think it needs to be spelled out. There are Wilsonesque touches here and there (the Be My Baby drumbeat), but they sound more like someone trying to sound like WIlson than they do like Wilson himself (although it could be a case of Picasso being able to forge a Picasso as well as anyone). Still, a decent song, and one that fits in with the album as a whole.

After another narrative section (the Narrative Of Venice Beach) we come to Live Let Live. This is just a lovely song, with the unmistakeable lyrics of Van Dyke Parks (and in fact it sounds musically a lot like Parks' work too). A gorgeous little waltz with lyrics that seem to sum up a lot of Wilson's work ("I've got a notion we've come from the ocean and God almighty has his hands on the water), full of playfully dumb internal rhymes and puns that come out the other side of stupid to sound clever and rather touching. While there are things in here that Wilson's done before (the arrangement sounds slightly like Kiss Me Baby and the chorus hook is lifted wholesale from Sail On Sailor), it's a far more mature, crafted song than we would normally expect from Wilson (whose rough edges have sometimes been part of his appeal). While it lifts from Sail On Sailor it's a far more life-affirming song than that one, being a positive 'yes!' rather than merely choosing to struggle on because that's what you do. It's the work of a man whose storms have finally becalmed themselves, at least for the present. It's a sweet, pleasant song with a stunning melody, by far the highlight of the set, and it must get released at some point even if the rest of the album doesn't, although it'll lose out by being out of context.

After a brief instrumental reprise of the That Lucky Old Sun theme, again beautifully orchestrated by Mertens and throwing in plenty of Ol' Man River we go into the upbeat Mexican Girl. This song is in many ways a complete departure for Wilson, sounding authentically Mexican, at least according to my friend Tilt Araiza, who knows more about these things than I do (although my wife Holly, who also knows more about these things than I do, says the Spanish is horribly mangled). The closest reference in Wilson's earlier work is South American, but where that was a joyless pseudo-Kokomo with as much joie de vivre as an office party, feeling like someone saying "now, we all like a bit of fun - I'm a Jimmy Buffet fan myself - but let's be sensible about it", this is a carnival. And like a lot of the songs here it's flat out funny at points - you can hear the tongues in cheeks as the band sing "hey bonita muchacha/let me know that I gotcha".

One thing, though, the main repeated melodic phrase (in for example "your castanet/on the day we met") is incredibly familliar to me but I can't place it. It's from (or sounds like) something from Sweet Insanity or that general period, but I can't think what.

After the Narrative of De Mayo we go into California Role, the only song (at least live) that Wilson doesn't sing solo lead on himself (he sings the middle eight), being sung by Nick Walusko (I think) through a distortion filter made to sound like a megaphone at the beginning and then in unison by several of the band later on. A vaudeville feeling song, sounding like it could have been sung by Rudy Valee, at least at first, the punning lyrics (the title refers not only to the 'rolling round heaven' elsewhere in the album and the 'finding your place' theme of the lyric, but is apparently a type of sushi, or so I am told) which at first seem life-affirming are, on examination, quite callous - "the Hollywood sign bursts through the smog and reawakens your dreams/living under this sun disappointment's not as bad as it seems", "Sometimes you've got to edit your dreams/and find a spotlight behind the scenes", although it's for the listener's own good - you probably won't become a film star, but you can still find a place for yourself if you try.

What amazes me, in this song and in the album as a whole, is the level of invention and inspiration. A lot of these songs don't follow any conventional verse-chorus-middle-eight structure at all, but instead take the listener on a journey, often covering multiple musical styles in the space of a single song, and defying conventional analysis. Most of them do have something that can be labelled a verse and something that can be labelled a chorus, both of which will be repeated at least once, but then they're full of sections that never get repeated. It's a discursive, rambling style that has a confidence, an arrogance to it that I associate with writers much younger than Wilson - people who think they have their whole lives ahead of them and they can throw as many ideas as they want into a song because there's a dozen more where that came from. Something like Autumn Almanac by the Kinks (written when Ray Davies was 22) has a similar structure. The best songs here have that arrogance of youth but coupled with a sense of life experience that can only come from someone of Wilson's age.

After a gospel-tinged contrapuntal 'roll around heaven' singalong and the Narrative Of Between Pictures we come to Oxygen, possibly my favourite song on the album, although not the best. The 'open up open up' opening of the song is one of Wilson's best nursery-rhyme melodies, similar to the intro to Happy Days/tag of On A Holiday. This intro is one of the two or three points in the album (the first line of Live Let Live being another) which causes an actual physical reaction in me - literally heart-stoppingly gorgeous for a few seconds, for reasons I can't explain. The song then becomes (mostly) an upbeat song about seizing the day, from the perspective of someone who has spent far too long 'wasting a lot of years'. It also illustrates the impossibility of knowing just from listening who did what on these songs. The lyric as a whole is pure Brian - it fits in with dozens of songs he's written in the past from H.E.L.P. Is On The Way to Life Is For The Living to He Couldn't Get His Poor Old Body To Move - but the one line "skip the vices verses get to the refrain" sounds like Parks, and I don't think Wilson could have written that line - his mind just doesn't seem to work that way.

Next we have a short section of Been Way Too Long, an old Beach Boys track from 1967 that was left unreleased until 1990. When seeing this live, this was one of the most emotional moments, thanks mostly to the use of footage of the three Wilson brothers together in the overhead projection. Incidentally, I'm firmly of the opinion that the best release of this would be as a DVD - the animations and other film segments created for the show were the best integration of 'multimedia' into a musical performance I've ever seen, and the narrative sections especially benefitted from them enormously.

After this comes Midnight's Another Day. This is one of the other songs that I suspect owes at least as much to Bennet as to Wilson - it does resemble some of Wilson's other songs to an extent, but they're ones, like Cry, that don't sound very Wilsonesque. And I must here admit to a horrible tin ear. The demo for this song was downloadable from brianwilson.com prior to the shows, and while everyone else was raving about how good it was I thought it really wasn't very good at all. In part, this was due to some very real flaws in the song. The scansion is all over the place - the stresses sound like bad comic book speech bubbles with random emphasis, and there's a ridiculous overuse of melisma. But these faults blinded me to the song's real strengths. Some of the clunkier lines actually refer back to phrases that have run through the album as a whole, and the whole album has been building up to this. Adding the fuller arrangements and the context of the rest of the album makes the song's flaws seem utterly trivial. The line 'all those people make me feel so alone' is just heartbreaking. The song works, and that's all there is to it. The song ends with a reprise of the Lucky Old Sun theme.

Going Home, which comes next, is a song that dates from (I think) the mid 90s originally, having been demoed for the Beach Boys and widely bootlegged. Much like Morning Beat, this is based around the Shortenin' Bread riff that's always obsessed Brian, and includes the 'rock, roll, rockin' and a rollin'' vocals he's always tried to get into songs (see his unreleased cover of Proud Mary for example), but even in this simple song he suddenly takes a left turn, dropping down to an a capella unison chant of "at twenty-five I turned out the lights/'cos I couldn't handle the pain in my tired eyes/but now I'm back drawing shades on bright blue skies".

The last song, Southern California is another one which sounds like it's more Scott Bennet's work (notably he sings lead on this on the demo), and it has some of the flaws of Midnight's Another Day without that song's strengths. The song only really takes flight on its very last line, when a falsetto countermelody comes in ("oh it's magical that it happened to me"), before tailing off into mama yama glory hallelujahs.

The album is patchy, and sags toward the end, but it's never less than interesting, frequently attains greatness, and it's obviously the work of someone trying to create something that works as a unified whole.

I have probably sold Scott Bennet short in this review, simply because he doesn't have the track record of Wilson or Parks. For all I know he was responsible for all the best moments, but if you heard a song credited to Lennon/McCartney/Smith, I suspect you wouldn't credit Smith with the good bits either. But everyone involved in this deserves an immense amount of credit, and they deserve to see this album released.

I'll be posting about Superman tonight or tomorrow...

More self-promotion

I'm going to be doing a proper update here tomorrow, but for now just a quick one to say that my band's new EP is now available from CDBaby as a CD for $5 or as MP3s for $1. Visit http://cdbaby.com/group/thenationalpep

That Lucky Old Sun - First Thoughts

Wow.

Everyone at last night's (woefully under-promoted) Brian Wilson gig went in hoping for the best but expecting the worst. The word was that the new piece, That Lucky Old Sun, had Brian more excited than he had been in years. That it was the most ambitious thing he'd ever done. That he'd put it together almost in secret, not even letting many of the band members, or his closest advisers, hear it until the last minute.

If it was good, that would be OK. But no-one had any idea if Brian Wilson was capable of 'good'. While his last proper album, Gettin' In Over My Head, was excellent, it was mostly songs from 10-25 years earlier. And if it was a failure... well... Brian Wilson fans care a lot about the notoriously-fragile songwriter, and it could be very bad for him.

The first set was promising, at least. Brian was in great (for him) voice, playing with the lower end of his range, going into comical bass parts. The setlist was unusual. While the Smile shows in 2004 had concentrated on pre-Pet Sounds material, as opposed to the late-60s and 70s material Wilson had played on his earlier tours, this set took that to a ridiculous extreme - other than a few hits, the setlist concentrated entirely on the Today! and Summer Days... And Summer Nights! albums, covering obscure tracks like Salt Lake City, Girl Don't Tell Me and She Knows Me Too Well. The one exception was the Wild Honey oddity I'd Love Just Once To See You - one of Wilson's little tossed-off jokey songs, but one I've always loved.

However, we were all there to hear That Lucky Old Sun.

The suite starts with a slow, soulful arrangement of the title song, with contrapuntal vocals somewhere between the old Beach Boys song He Come Down and Brian's arrangement of Ol' Man River, before bursting into the Shortenin' Bread riff Brian has based so much of his music on. The band start singing "Ooh mow mama mama holy hallelujah" - a vocal line that Brian first mentioned in an interview thirty years ago - and the piece proper begins.

Is That Lucky Old Sun any good? I truly have no idea. It's too complex a piece, and too multi-layered, and the performance of it too bound up in personal expectations, for any kind of judgement to be made on one hearing. But in a sense, the question doesn't matter. That Lucky Old Sun is exciting - in a way that no-one could have expected. This is the work of a 65-year-old man. 65 year old men don't make exciting music. Paul McCartney's new album might be quite pleasant, but he knows no-one's going to remember him as 'the man who made Memory Almost Full', and it shows.

Brian Wilson appears not to have given up hope that he'll be remembered as 'the man who made That Lucky Old Sun', and it's just about possible that he might. While in some ways this new work bears comparison to the McCartney album, at heart it couldn't be more different. While both have lyrics looking back from the end of a life and recapping themes of old songs, in the case of That Lucky Old Sun they're working in tension against the music, which is overwhelmingly energetic, inspired, throwing off ideas like there's a million more out there to get to in a hurry.

Like I said earlier, this may well be a failure - I'm just not willing to trust my own judgement based on one emotionally-charged live performance - but if it is it's a glorious, fantastic mess of a failure, the kind of failure one might expect from an artist a third of Wilson's age. And I suspect it isn't.

Part of this may be due to Wilson's band. While he's been working with essentially the same band for nearly a decade, they've been performing old material - sometimes in new forms, but always conceived before they started working with him. But for the first time Wilson is able to work with them as collaborators. Keyboardist Scott Bennett wrote many of the lyrics, bandleader Darian Sahanaja (of the Wondermints), the Billy Strayhorn to Wilson's Duke Ellington, helped Wilson structure the piece and teach it to the band, and woodwind player Paul Mertens arranged the strings and horns. Van Dyke Parks, Wilson's most sympathetic collaborator, wrote the linking narrative and at least some of the lyrics.

But while Wilson may need help realising his vision, it's his vision - this could not be the work of anyone other than Brian Wilson. Little touches creep in from previous works - a vocal part from the unfinished 60s song Can't Wait Too Long, a full song ( Going Home ) from his mid-90s sessions with Andy Paley - and Wilson's musical signatures are all over the piece. But at the same time, it's not just Wilson staying within his comfort zone - the mariachi-flavoured Mexican Girl, for example, is utterly unlike anything he's done before.

The narrative, such as it is, is rather abstract as far as I could tell (I couldn't make out many of the lyrics). It deals with love, California, the sea - themes Wilson has touched on before on occasion, as you may know - but through the eyes of a man in his sixties rather than his twenties, drawing on the loss of his brothers. There is also a very strong religious theme throughout the material. Given that Wilson and Parks' previous collaboration, Smile, was practically an invocation of the sun-god, I wish I could have heard more of the lyrics to make out how important this was. The spoken narrative, written by Parks, is in rhyming couplets over musical pads, and reminiscent of the Beaks Of Eagles section of California Saga, if that track had been infinitely less pretentious and infinitely more interesting.

There were definitely flaws in the piece as performed last night, but it remains to be seen how much of that is the piece and how much the first-night performance. At times in the earlier sections of the piece, the whole band vamps on two-chord riffs, similarly to the sections of Smile where they play the Heroes & Villains riff (That Lucky Old Sun is to Shortenin' Bread as Smile is to the Bicycle Rider chorus), with the various instruments playing different variations at the same time. These sections seemed to me overlong and lacking in dynamic range, but there may well be subtleties in there I couldn't hear - the mix seemed at times to be murky, and the sound engineer seemed unprepared for how loudly Wilson was singing (a couple of times the vocals distorted). If this is more to do with the night than the material, it could possibly be Wilson's best album ever. If not, then at least he tried.

And there are some pointers to it being a success. I was extremely wary about the piece from the demos of two songs ( Midnight's Another Day and Forever My Surfer Girl) posted on Wilson's website, which are frankly fairly poor. However, in context, and with the additional orchestration, both are much stronger than those recordings suggest. Midnight's Another Day, in particular, had me in tears - and this is a song I'd dismissed as tedious.

I have no idea how I'll modify my initial impression of this piece when I listen dispassionately to the finished recording, but the sheer invention, joy, energy and vigour of the piece has to be heard to be believed.

After his normal hits encore, Wilson performed She's Leaving Home, in an absolutely audacious rearrangement that has to be heard to be believed - he's turned the verses into a 4/4 uptempo piece of sunshine pop owing equally to the Beatles' Getting Better and his own Let Him Run Wild, while keeping the waltz time chorus identical to the original. It turns the song upside down and inside out, and I've been unable to stop humming it since. It's the work of a musician at the height of his powers and confidence.

For the last ten years, fans have been expecting Brian Wilson to (at best) retire and (at worst) drop dead. From the release of his album Imagination, which re-established him as a solo performer, time and again he's done things (touring, performing Pet Sounds in its entirety, facing the legacy of Smile, completing Smile) that we've said would have to be the peak, the ultimate. Time and again we've said "there's no way he can follow that. It'll all be downhill from here - but that's OK, he's given us more than we could hope already." Time and again he's not only followed it, but done something exponentially, unimaginably better. Even if That Lucky Old Sun proves in the cold light of day a lesser work than Smile, it's a work that can be compared to it, and he wrote it in a matter of months rather than over a period of forty years. For a man people were writing off as having lost it before I was born, that's an astonishing comeback.

For the first time, I feel confident in not saying "he can't top that" but instead saying "how's he going to top that?"

I can't wait to find out.

Love Punks released

Just a very quick post to say that Love Punks Want To Make You Cry, the new EP from my band The National Pep, can now be purchased by paypalling $5 US/ £2 UK to andrew@thenationalpep.co.uk , and will shortly be available from our CDBaby page , where our previous EP, Citizen Gomez, is still available for $5 (or $1 as MP3s).

I'll be posting a review of the Brian Wilson gig this evening. For now, I'll just say... wow...

Love Punks Want To Make You Cry - Some Crass Commercialism

I mentioned briefly in my last post that my own band, The National Pep, have an EP coming out in just over a week. Since posting that, I've received the final mixes from my collaborator Tilt Araiza, and have put them up on last.fm for streaming. If you can, please check them out - I'm especially proud of Jaded, which I honestly believe is the best track you'll hear this year (and I say that despite, rather than because, of my co-authorship of it). And those of you who came here from my comics blog will find the lyrics to Degrees Of Freedom strangely familiar.

If you like it, it'll be on sale in a little over a week. And right now you can buy our first EP, Citizen Gomez, for $5 as a physical CD or $1 as MP3s from CDBaby (or you can buy the tracks from iTunes if you prefer DRM'd .aac files).

Let me know what you think - I'll try not to do too many of these commercial posts.

That Lucky Old Sun

September 10 sees the premiere of a major new work by possibly the most important songwriting team alive today.

But enough about Love Punks Want To Make You Cry by The National Pep...

Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks are premiering their new song cycle, That Lucky Old Sun, in London on September 10th, and I am amazed at how little anticipation there is for this work.

The last ten years have been amazing ones for Wilson. After his brother Carl's death in early 1998, he released his first solo album of new material in ten years, Imagination and then did what many people would have thought unthinkable - started touring regularly. And not just that, he kept setting the bar higher and higher for himself.

First, he got together what is, bar none, the best live band in the world today. The technical skill, devotion to the music, and feel for music his band have is extraordinary. (To take just one example, I'll buy any record featuring multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory, despite him being 'merely' a sideman, because he's invariably on good stuff - he plays with the Wondermints, Cosmo Topper, The Negro Problem, The Now People, Stew, The Mello Cads and probably half a dozen more bands I can't think of, and every one of them is excellent).

He then started performing some of his most obscure, but greatest, songs live. Most of his fans would have bet ten years ago that they'd never hear live performances of The Night Was So Young, 'Til I Die, Busy Doin' Nothin' or Friends - Wilson showed that those 'unperformable' songs could be performed in a live setting and would work, and raised the bar so far for what people expect from a live performance of Beach Boys music that now even Mike Love's touring 'Beach Boys' perform 'Til I Die and Friends on tour.

Then he performed the whole of the Pet Sounds album live, and then followed that with something that no Brian Wilson fan could have dreamed of - the completion of the album, Smile, that had been left unfinished for nearly 40 years.

Smile, in its final form, is a masterpiece I want to talk about at a future date, but the important thing about it is that it was infinitely better in its finished version than the bootlegged and released individual selections from it suggested. This was partly due to the structure of the album, and partly due to the additional lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, which tied together all the themes of the album quite brilliantly.

The structure is what's important when considering what That Lucky Old Sun will be like. Wilson has always been a master of dynamics and juxtaposition - several times he's elevated rather weak material to something like greatness. Much of Pet Sounds, for example, taken song-by-song, is actually only average for Wilson. It's the flow of the album, the way he guides you through the emotional peaks and troughs, and the placement of the few truly great songs, that makes the album what it is.

I point this out because some people (myself included) are rather underwhelmed by the one track from That Lucky Old Sun we've heard so far, Midnight's Another Day ( available for free download at http://brianwilson.com ). A few people appear very impressed, but I honestly can't see why - it sounds like the kind of impressionistic mooing we got on Cry from Imagination.

However, this song doesn't sound like a Wilson/Parks collaboration - there are problems with the lyrical scansion ( the stress on 'sun' and 'over' in the second and third lines, the melisma on 'now shades of grey', and many more) that suggest the lyric is at least in part Wilson's - being primarily a musician Wilson sometimes ignores the natural stress-patterns of the English language rather than change his melodies. Parks is usually a good enough lyricist to make this unnecessary.

So as an individual song, this is unimpressive. But as part of a larger work, it could be astonishing. And there is every evidence it will be. Wilson and Parks have two great collaborations behind them - Smile and Orange Crate Art (the latter effectively a Parks solo album, but with Wilson on lead vocals). Both are also adept at working in pre-rock songs into their work - neither man is a rock & roller by nature.

But what really interests me is that Wilson has announced that the piece will be a narrative, with ten songs in five sections with spoken narration between them. Wilson has attempted this form before, on the startling "Mount Vernon & Fairway: A Fairytale" from the Holland album. That piece, which I urge you to track down and listen to, is the most outrageously brilliant, audacious, avant-garde thing Wilson ever did. If Wilson and Parks can come up with anything even close to that, I will be the happiest man alive on September 10. And even if not, well, it'll still be a great Brian Wilson gig, and ten years ago I never thought I'd see one of those.