The sound of both the guitar and saxophone were a little abrasive and hard to listen to. But once the solos came in, an edginess appeared. The cash register ka-ching came from over my head and the chatter of money-counting machines vibrated at my right. With a spatial mix of that old audiophile standard, Money by Pink Floyd, I found that the song sounded like a fairground ride on the Studio. Whether it was stereo tunes or way-out Atmos remixes, the Sonos Era 300 offered a more refined sound than the Echo Studio. I wanted to know which of the two offered the better deal, especially as the Echo Studio is less than half the price of the Sonos. Ty Pendlebury/CNET Up against EchoĪs the second Atmos speaker on the market, the Sonos Era 300 faces a lot of competition from the first - the Amazon Echo Studio. (Both musicians also appear on No Pier Pressure.) Wilson says the shows comprise Beach Boys classics and several songs from No Pier Pressure.The top of the Sonos Era 300 has the controls and microphones. “The thing that makes the album so good is the harmonies that we used with our voices,” Wilson says.īeach Boys singer and guitarist Al Jardine is helping out with harmonies on the current tour, along with Blondie Chaplin, who briefly sang and played guitar for the group in the early ’70s. The two hoped to recapture the mid-’60s Beach Boys harmonies on No Pier Pressure. And it’s absolutely a joy to work and to write a song.” “He plunks out chords on the piano, and I come up with melodies - and he comes up with some of the melodies - and then we both write the lyrics. “I have a collaborator who plays a lot of good chords,” Wilson says of Thomas. He collaborated on the songwriting with Joe Thomas, a producer and director with a long history in the music and television industries. Wilson’s eleventh studio album, No Pier Pressure, was released in April on Capitol and features guest appearances by She & Him, Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess and Sebu Simonian of Capital Cities. While Wilson was quite prolific in the ’60s, he acknowledges that writing takes longer these days: “I’m not quite as active as I used to be, so the songs don’t come real fast. I learned how to write positive music,” he says. “It got me in the studio producing records with a positive type of sound, like the Phil Spector sound. It was the Spector-produced “Be My Baby,” which Wilson listened to every day for many years, that inspired him to produce records in the first place. Wilson also arranged and produced the recording, using some of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound techniques in the studio. Then we started writing the Pet Sounds album.” “And then a few days later, me and my collaborator wrote the rest of it. “I listened to Rubber Soul by the Beatles and was so impressed with it that I went to my piano and started writing ‘God Only Knows,’” Wilson says. Wilson and collaborator Tony Asher explored personal themes on the album Wilson notes that it was a departure from songs about surfing and cars. Pet Sounds was mostly written and recorded while the rest of the Beach Boys were touring. “I told them who I was, and we got to talking, and then I handed them some manuscript papers, where I wrote out the notes for them to play and the chords and the drumbeats.” “It started out where I’d just talk to them a little bit, you know?,” he recalls. Wilson says it was easier working with studio musicians, as they were more accomplished and worked a little harder than the other Beach Boys. To create it, Wilson recruited the Wrecking Crew, a group of some of Los Angeles’s finest studio musicians, among them drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Carol Kaye, pianist Don Randi and guitarist Barney Kessel. In Love & Mercy, a fair amount of screen time is spent in the studio during the making of Pet Sounds, considered by many to be Wilson’s masterpiece and one of the greatest albums in the history of rock and roll. They hung out with me for about a week and got familiar with my mannerisms…. “I thought the actors that both portrayed me were letter-perfect. “I think it was a very accurate and factual movie,” Wilson says. The other is the ’80s Wilson (played by John Cusack), who was under the strict control of his therapist, Dr. One is the mid-’60s Wilson (portrayed by Paul Dano), who had stopped touring with the Beach Boys to work on songs that would eventually end up on Pet Sounds. In Bill Pohlad’s new film, Love & Mercy, the director explores two different eras of Brian Wilson.
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