Best track on the Beach Boys' SMiLE

The SMiLE Cabinessence vs the Smiley one is the one of the most o_O ?! choices in their career up there with Hey Little School Girl and Problem Child. The Smiley one is SO BAD. The og one is one of the best things ever produced by a human.

can’t remember what the 2004 one sounds like… the og/sea of tunes stuff is so fused into my mind

"CabinEssence" isn't on Smiley Smile, and the 20/20 version seems to be simply the original track with lead vocals overdubbed?

I'd say "Wind Chimes" is the most boldest Smiley Smile remake, and "Wonderful" the least successful. Never really liked "VegeTables" in any version.

The Smiley version of « wonderful » is sabotage

i'd love to hear a smiley smile version of cabinessence

the first times i heard Cabinessence were on a bootleg without the lead vocals and i imagined the prominent "doing! doing! doing!" vocals being sung by cartoon squirrels or beavers. the looney stuff connected with me most at that time and i always loved Vegatables. "if you brought a big brown bag of them home, i'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot" !!! i mean come on

the thing about the sessions that the finished album with 3 movements kind of disguises imo is how Brian's ideation of the album evolves over the course of the dates, how the kind of album he wants to make is a rapidly moving target and he pivots when he gets excited about a new direction or theme. and like splitting it into 3 movements where the whole thing has this very moving emotional arc that wasn't apparent before, it just makes the constant readjustments seem very deliberate, like there was this master plan all along. and it's much more clear on the stack o tracks that this wasn't the case.

iow i think on the old bootlegs there's a sense that Brian can't keep up with the album itself, that it's overpowering him in quite a sinister way, that it has its own animus that can't be tamed and it's quite dangerous. and like, now we've harnessed that and we're in control of what it does, even though it feels like playing with fire at times

no pun intended

like i wondering if the 2004 version is definitive why the 2011 one is ultimately more satisfying in some way and maybe it's cause that one retains more of the sense of playing with fire, like this is some potent shit that we've revived and are messing with

like i don't wanna lump the sessions in the "the mystique of unfinished works" because there are unfinished works that just feel aborted or half baked, and this feels like it got the better of its composer and ate him alive?

Brian can't keep up with the album itself

Definitely. Even the way he keeps juggling the "bicycle rider" theme in different keys, tempi and arrangements suggest a kind of obsessive tinkering when you hear it in a dozen different places in the sessions tapes.

...and he kept at it until he wrote "Can't Wait Too Long", maybe my favourite Beach Boys song of all.

love this reading, Deflatormouse. and I'm a fan of the 2004 one! not sure I've ever heard the 2011 one. hmm.

transition from the huge 2011 mix O'Leary's Cow with 'Fall Breaks' vocals into Cool Cool Water intro is this moment of tremendous psychic relief that Love to Say Dada in its original form never achieved- deeply healing, the most satisfying possible resolution to everything that's come before. And then it goes abruptly into unfinished 'Love to Say DAda' without the "Blue Hawaii" stuff, the album once again has the upper hand and it undermines the resolution, it's just a deeply unsettling note to end the third act on.

2004 Smile doesn't give me that.

feel like I've read at least two Brian Wilson books but I can't remember anything about why The Old Master Painter? Is Brian Wilson the inventor of interpolation? And I could guess, but why The Old Master Painter?