Add Some Music To Your Day: A Brian Wilson Tribute

There was some chatter on Music Twitter recently about songs indebted to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, and it inspired me to dust off & update an old mix (which I've posted on Spotify, see below). It also got me thinking about a late (online) friend and the glory days of the old website Art Of The Mix. Back in the mid-90s, a small coterie of music-obsessed nerds would burn CDR mixes, post the tracklists/artwork online, and trade them copies via snail mail with fellow mixers. It was an open site, but there were maybe a couple dozen regulars who would post a new mix--maybe a single-artist mix focused on some obscure act they loved, or a genre mix, or a mix with some silly theme (songs about dogs! songs with days of the week in the title!)--every week or so and then ship off copies to anyone who asked.

One of the nicest of those regulars, Ion Moe, shared my taste in power pop, and we used to send a lot of CDRs back-and-forth. One of his coolest creations was titled Pet Soundalikes, featuring a wide array of Beach Boys-inspired originals and covers, from the 60s up through the present; he ended up making a dozen or so mixes in the series. Sadly, Ion passed away a couple years ago, and we never had a chance to meet in real life, though we connected periodically on Facebook. The original Art of the Mix is likewise long gone; the fan-run site was eventually overtaken by viruses, and while a successor page went online, by then streaming media, and the ease of sharing playlists without running to the post office (not to mention the vanishing of CD players from most cars & homes) had rendered CDR mixes relatively obsolete. It exists now as just a static archive (just saw my mixes (all 376 of them!) are still there).

I later borrowed the Pet Soundalikes idea from Ion, though my concoction was more narrowly focused on the mid/late-60s baroque vibe of the post-Pet Sounds/Smile era, eschewing their earlier surf songs. My CDR had a few tracks that pushed the edges a bit, but the updated playlist I just posted sticks with that very distinct Wilsonesque aesthetic. Enjoy!