ARTIST: 60's Pop - The gift that keeps on giving

We're back!! Sorry about the technical difficulties. Such is life I guess.

So every year or so I get into a mood where nothing will satisfy me quite like The Beatles. I'll listen to their whole catalog again, sometimes several times over.

About mid-December I listened to an NPR podcast of Bob Boilen's All Songs Considered where he sat down and dissected The White Album with Bruce Spizer (who wrote The Beatles On Apple Records), and that set me off. I tore apart the White Album like I never had before, and if you've got a few minutes I could talk your ear off about how that album is the perfect post-modern follow-up to the seminal Sgt. Pepper's (insights I attribute mostly to my recent Humanities class). But I'll spare you.

The last couple times I've gone into a Beatles binge, it's been closely followed by an intense interest in The Beach Boys. Kinda funny, but I've just spent the last couple weeks tearing apart some of their old albums as well. I dived back into my (beloved) Pet Sounds, and finally purchased a copy of Brian Wilson's Smile (rather amazing). I also just became familiar with their early seventies efforts Sunflower and Surf's Up. Wow. I have to admit that I'd written these guys off as has-beens forever after Pet Sounds dropped, Smile got shelved, and Smiley Smile flopped. I've been excited to discover how wrong I was. Though neither of these records (Sunflower or Surf's Up) are quite the masterpiece that Pet Sounds was, they are far from has-been material, and I've had a blast discovering them.

Here's an exceptional track from Surf's Up, one I've already loved for awhile due to it's inclusion on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. Though technically not 60's pop (it was released in 1971) it's still an incredible song. Hooray for re-discovering old gems.

The Beach Boys - Feel Flows
from the album Surf's Up (Amazon/iTunes)