Brian Wilson feeling sunny about new album

Later on, when Ledbetter comes home with their small son Dylan — floppy-haired, barefoot and wearing a Hawaiian shirt — Wilson brightens. He’s quieter when it comes to daughters Wendy and Carnie, who both live less than 10 miles away.

“I don’t talk to them very much. I used to. I recorded with them at one time, but I don’t talk to them a lot,” he says, explaining that the women are “really busy.”

Questions about the Beach Boys’ current status get lukewarm response as well. Wilson, who also formed the band with cousin Mike Love and then-school friend Al Jardine, split with most of the group’s surviving members years ago amid legal squabbles. Love and later Beach Boys bandmate Bruce Johnston tour as the Beach Boys Band, while Jardine has his own Endless Summer Band. Wilson stresses the subject’s touchiness.

“We don’t want any publicity about me getting back with the Beach Boys, cause I don’t want to. They’re not my group anymore. That’s Mike and Bruce’s group now. I’m on my own, and I would rather do that than go back to the Beach Boys,” he says.

Wilson, though, clearly loves performing Beach Boys tunes as well as his own solo work, even with nightly stage fright, which he says he works through by getting neck and shoulder rubs, and praying.

At a taping days later for Yahoo! Music’s Live Sets, Wilson is joined onstage by his nine-piece band, including Bennett and members of the Wondermints, who have played with him for 10 years.

Tentatively at first, Wilson claps his hands and directs the group in rousing, harmony-filled versions of such Beach Boys classics as “Help Me Rhonda” and “I Get Around.” Wilson later sings from the new album.

When asked during a Q&A session his biggest regret, he doesn’t mince words.

“The drugs I took which kind of messed up my mind. The LSD, the marijuana, the cocaine,” he says, to audience laughter.

Wilson isn’t letting his past stop him from throwing his ambitions forward.

After “That Lucky Old Sun,” Wilson says the unreleased songs he recorded, including a slow, smooth version of “Proud Mary,” will form another album. He gushes that “the only person I really want to work with is Paul McCartney.” He would also like to record “a rock ’n’ roll album inspired by Phil Spector’s type records, a really hard rock album that really rocks, with big orchestration, the whole bit.”

Yet, he also views his future gingerly, as day to day.

“I look forward to today,” he tells The AP. “I never look forward to the future because I think to myself, ‘What if there’s an earthquake, what if I die or someone I love dies?’ I get those kind of thoughts all the time. It’s ‘oof’ to my head.”

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