Brian Wilson, "Going Home"

Last August, Brian Wilson released a new CD, That Lucky Old Sun, that completely eluded my radar. Indeed, when a friend urged me to check it out a week or two ago, I assumed it was brand new.

So I'm listening to it today, impressed with Wilson's lingering tastefulness in melody and arrangement and thinking there's quite a bit of Randy Newman influence. But there is a wall between me and Brian Wilson, and that wall is Southern California.

Wilson and his Beach Boys brethren kind of crystallized a sun-sweetened SoCal aesthetic, a life of girls girls girls and fun fun fun - and I have never felt that carefree anywhere, least of all L.A., in whose Orange County shadows I lived for one very confusing year at the turn of the millennium. There are many ways to apprehend L.A. - Wilson's surf fantasia, Jim Morrison's narcissistic and violent nightmare images, War's unmeltable melting pot of a ghetto, Van Halen's glittery unreal parade - and my own experience was one of bland sunniness, unmerging cars ridden solo, gated communities, parties where your value is gauged by what you're carrying, but for all of that, a place to buckle down and ambitiously get things done.

My year behind the Orange Curtain remains an anomaly in my life, a chapter that doesn't seem to fit in my book. So hearing songs like "Going Home" that celebrate L.A. is always a faintly dissociative experience for me, and to hear an entire album of same far more so. It's a beautiful album - but it'd be even more beautiful if I got it.