It’s very possible that we’ve heard the last of Brian Wilson. Not because the opulent pop of the Beach Boys, or his rich and tortured personal mythology, are showing any fade in ubiquity—a movie about both, with Paul Dano and John Cusack playing younger and current-day versions of him, respectively, comes out this summer—but because the man himself is speaking bluntly of his possible retirement from music this year.
So for anyone who grew up with a reverence for Wilson’s brilliant work—which, especially if you’re from California, can veer into a fanatic sort of transposed paternal empathy—his new and eleventh solo album No Pier Pressure carries the burden of serving as his gold watch. Yet the record largely cedes the floor to duets with trendy young singers (Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess of fun., Zooey Deschanel, all audibly rhapsodic), a foreign and not entirely flattering experiment for Wilson. The album’s clearest predecessor is Santana’s Supernatural (1999), from which sprang the malevolent radio hydra "Smooth", and other forays into May-September duet hinterland. (There’s been an upswing of the latter in the past year, from Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga fluttering their jazz hands all hither and thither to Barry Manilow’s gauche, grave-digging extreme of shoving his voice into dusty audio of Whitney Houston and Marilyn Monroe.)
Unlike Carlos Santana, though, who could just wedge in a noodling guitar break and shuffle back to his inexplicable stiletto empire, Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized—the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant—or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma. It’s apparent throughout that this album was originally intended as a reunited Beach Boys effort, as their songwriting staples are faithfully represented: the orchestrations are lush and swooning, the lyrics set in beatific seaside tableaus and brimming with sepia wistfulness. Wilson sounds most confident with his former band cohorts; several tracks feature amiable turns from Al Jardine and David Marks. Of the whippersnapper duets, Wilson’s coziest harmonizing with Ruess, whose high, earnest keening could’ve been plucked from the Beach Boys’ Sunflower era.
In listening to No Pier Pressure, uneasy questions rise about base motives. Wilson freely admits that he doesn’t listen to modern music, and was so surprised to hear Frank Ocean rap that he dismissed him from the album. That likely means that these duet artists were pitched to him for the project, with the hopes that some of those younger fanbases would follow along. It’s a pretty farfetched expectation: are Zooey Deschanel’s fans now really going to stampede en masse to the nearest Urban Outfitters and demand Orange Crate Art?
But to speculate this project was foisted whole on Wilson would infantilize him, a casual disservice done all too readily in the press (what other 72-year-old Grammy winner’s collaborations would prompt the caveat "whether he’s aware of it or not," despite his ability to still deliver an incisive interview?). And there’s a warm timbre to all these artists’ voices that could surely appeal to Wilson. Whatever the cause, this is new territory for him: He’s sat in with young bucks here and there (Mini Mansions, Emile Haynie, the adulatory Brian Fest concert last month in Los Angeles) but he’s never been gregarious with his own material. His most recent album collaborators have been old friends returned to the fold, from a reunion with Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks to the global Beach Boys reunion of 2012.
There’s a happy accident in disunion, though: the closing track "The Last Song", which was originally intended for Lana Del Rey before she sulked off into the sunset. It’s the autonomous note Wilson deserves to end on, a lovely, bittersweet swath of the elegiac strings and gilded harmonies he perfected in his youth with "The Warmth of the Sun" and "Caroline, No". Wilson sighs, "Don’t be sad/ There was a time and place for what we had/ If there was just another chance for me to sing to you." It’s a worthy, prideful summation of a gorgeous life’s work, both innocent and wizened at once. And he didn’t need any young blood to get there.
