From Randy Lewis of THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:
Brian Wilson's 'That Lucky Old Sun' album due in September
The former Beach Boys mainstay's themed work, snapshots of Southern
California life, will be released Sept. 2 and represents his return to
Capitol.
By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 19, 2008
Brian Wilson extends his personal and creative renaissance of the last
decade with an ambitious new themed album, "That Lucky Old Sun," a
work to be released in September exploring the Southern California
culture that he helped define musically in the 1960s as the guiding
creative force of the Beach Boys.
Wilson also returns to his former group's longtime label, Capitol
Records, for this project that comes on the heels of his completion in
2004 of his "Smile" album, which he shelved in 1967 because of
mounting personal and professional problems.
"Brian Wilson is an iconic talent with enormous musical influence all
over the world and we are very proud to be representing him," said Guy
Hands, executive chairman of Capitol's parent company, EMI Music.
Hands and other EMI and Capitol executives are scheduled to appear
with Wilson today at Capitol's headquarters in Hollywood for the
formal announcement of their renewed partner****p.
"That Lucky Old Sun," slated for release Sept. 2, got its world
premiere last September in London's Royal Festival Hall, the same
venue where he unveiled the finished "Smile" after aborting it 37
years earlier.
"Smile" had been widely anticipated as a rival to the Beatles' "Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as a dramatic advance in pop music
of the time. After its belated release in 2004, "Smile" landed at No.
2, behind Kanye West's "The College Dropout," among the Village
Voice's nationwide poll of pop music critics on the year's best
albums.
"That Lucky Old Sun," written by Wilson in collaboration with "Smile"
lyricist Van Dyke Parks and Wilson's latter-day band member Scott
Bennett, features an "interwoven series of 'rounds' with interspersed
spoken word," its composer said in a statement released today.
It comprises a series of narratives with the sun, voiced by Wilson, as
the narrator of a series of snapshots of life in Southern California.
Reviewing the London performance, England's Mojo magazine called it
Wilson's "most ambitious new work since returning from the wilderness,
[recalling] 'Pet Sounds' and 'Smile,' not least in its playfully
baroque arrangements -- a playground riot of glockenspiel, timpani,
strings and harmonies all played with a smile -- and melodic nods to
the Beach Boy canon, complementing the autobiographical bent of the
lyric-book."
Wilson, 65, and his band are scheduled to introduce "That Lucky Old
Sun" to hometown audiences in a string of three performances Sept. 12
to 14 at the Hollywood Bowl.
Mark L. Falconer-film and video links at
http://hometown.aol.com/mfalc1/links.html
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