Wouldnt It Be Nice | Page 4

they're not getting at what he wants to express. Only his songs are able to do that. "It's not so hard to do an album with Van Dyke, say. But where does that put my head, you know? I was frightened of the idea of doing all standards. If you get into that, it would be..." He lets out a weight-of-the-world sigh. "You'd have to make a decision. You've got to make a decision whether you're going to go into it, or you're not going to go into it, you know what I mean? I believe I have made that decision, and it...that decision took a lot out of me."
And suddenly it's clear what Wilson means. It is scary. You make a decision to make a revolutionary, unheardof record like Smile, and suddenly your group doesn't want to sing it, your record company doesn't want you to take the time you need to finish it, and even the musicians in the studio are telling you, "You're crazy, Brian. You're out of your mind."
You make a decision to work with the Beach Boys again. ("Was it Mozart they had to invent the piano for?" David Leaf says after the interview. "Brian Wilson invented an instrument called the Beach Boys, and now he wants to play that instrument again.") The band's popularity is sagging, they need you as they've always needed you. But when you reach out to them they turn away.
Being a singer is much less scary. It's a way back in. "Orange crate art was a place to start," begins the opening track of the new album. "Orange crate art was a world apart."
*
Parks remembers the gradual way that Wilson became emotionally involved in the album. One line in "Sail Away" nearly provoked a crisis, when it was time for Wilson to sing "We'll raise a toast to what's left of my memory."
"I was thinking of me when I wrote that," Parks says. "Memory to me is always such an incredible thing. Perhaps the principal purpose of DNA. I think this is a natural function of evolved life on earth: to discover the reason for the big bang, what happened, where's my wallet, who am I with--memory's big, put it in the piece. When Brian sang that line, I remember thinking, 'Uh oh. I shouldn't have said that.' But you know something? He saw it right away. And we decided not to let it be uncomfortable for either of us. I think it's because I decided not to take it out.
"There were some other things. He couldn't stand the politics, the third world I mentioned in that piece. There were lyrics he didn't like, and he played his power of veto with the ease that a veteran like him is allowed to. As he got more interested in veto, my feelings got less hurt, because I realized that he was starting to get possessive about the project.
"What was happening in the process was that it was creating someone that doesn't exist, a single character that we developed. We were trying to conjure up a personality that would govern this record from top to bottom.
"This is a person who's lived a while. It does look like time has become a consideration in these lyrics, that this is not from the perspective of someone who is too young either to disappoint or have been disappointed. He's a person who's old enough to have done both."
*
Everything about the album has this sort of reflexivity and layered meaning, some of it intentional, some of it evolved. It started with a single song, "Orange Crate Art." And although he is likely to "sweat bullets" over his lyrics, it's the melody that comes first for Parks.
"I don't make up melodies. Melodies occur to me. They come from somewhere else. The melodies that I hear come to me while I'm cooking, thinking about nothing but what's on the stove."
"Orange Crate Art" started with just a melody line. "I got the piece down, it's a lovely little piece, I decided to slap some lyrics on it, just for fun, because I like to write songs for fun. It's a diversion. And in the process--although I wouldn't intend this, ever--it reveals something about myself. It helps me...maintain an elasticity. I amass these songs, and about once every five years I put them on a record."
Because Parks makes a living "with very low-profile musical endeavors"--film music, hired-gun producing and arranging--it gives him the freedom to make idiosyncratic personal records at his own pace. "I had the permission to record an album, but I had no idea of what I was going to do, I never do. So I made up this song, I went into this studio, I sang it, and then I realized that I would rather have some