“‘The Warmth Of The Sun’ is one of the more beautiful songs I think we've ever done. I wrote the lyrics; Brian did the music, and we wrote it one night in 1963 after we were awakened with the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. And so obviously, that song has a melancholy sadness. And we didn't change the lyrics at that point, I had written them down. But it was about losing someone you love, but at least you had had the feeling of having been in love.”

“As The Beatles were sweeping America, we released a new single, conceived in rather spontaneous fashion. Brian and I were in a taxi in Salt Lake City, Utah, heading from a Holiday Inn to the airport. I told him that I thought we should write a song about that teenager experience of getting your driver’s license, borrowing your parents’ car, and then driving to see and be seen. It was a rite of passage. Brian wrote the music and I wrote most of the lyrics.”

“What I like to do is to hear the track and just really isolate myself and listen to it time after time — maybe ten times in a row — to get into the mood of the track and then have the flow of the words be dictated by the tempo and the feel. I didn’t feel pressure writing lyrics, I just needed to isolate myself and listen. Brian might have a lyrical idea — like the phrase ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ — but I wrote the rest of the words. The same way he had the line, ‘I wish they all could be California girls’ — then I wrote the lyrics in the hallway of the studio. Nobody structures harmonies, chord progressions, and melodies better than Brian. My part was writing the lyrics and the hooks. I was blessed to have him as a first cousin and we have a special chemistry together.”

“I had come back from a surfing trip with some high school buddies, which inspired ‘Do It Again.’ Brian remembers it as being at my house. I remember it as being at his house. He pounded at the piano, while I summoned up the words. We got a chorus together, which was basically a bunch of doo-wop-inspired harmonies. We created that whole song in 15 minutes. I love it.”

“Those are the pillars of our success. That's the basis of our popularity through today, because even if their parents hadn't met yet in the '60s, they'll still have The Beach Boys on their iPods along with groups like The Beatles and maybe the Motown groups — I mean, that's some seriously great music.”

“I think ‘Good Vibrations’ was probably the height of our creativity in the '60s. The song and the record were not only successful — really successful — but it was very unique. It was probably the least derivative of our hit singles. But with ‘Good Vibrations,’ it was so darn different, so unique sounding. And yet it was successful as well. And I admit to liking things that are both successful and creative (laughs)! It was a pleasure to work with my cousin Brian on co-creating that song. And, I think, many years ago, Rolling Stone had some poll and they regarded ‘Good Vibrations’ as the ‘Single of the Century,’ or something like that.”

“I'm a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation — TM. When the Maharishi first came out teaching TM he said, ‘For the forest to be green, every tree must be green.’ Real simple things. And if there's going to be world peace, that means the individuals need to feel peaceful from within.”

“’Brian's Back’ was a campaign for a record company, but it was far more than that for all the rest of us. Brian went through so much to literally get ‘back.’ He was back in the studio involved with us, helping to do the tracks and I worked with him directly on several songs. I think it was a lot to expect that Brian would return to the peak of his authority in the studio. I wanted to make it easy to get Brian back where he was known to do best by doing some really great tracks. That’s why I suggested ‘Rock And Roll Music’ — because our formula was surfin’ and cars on top of a Chuck Berry-type beat. It’s a trippy little arrangement, but for a group that had been out of it for a while, that’s not bad considering all the competition at the time. We went Top Five.”

“Brian was at his height as a producer; demanding, improvising, driven to excel. He typically didn’t have music written out on sheets. He just came in, played it on the piano and someone wrote it out. On one song alone, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’, he used a harpsichord, an electric bass, flutes, guitars, a piano, four saxophones, a bongo, timpani — and Latin percussion. For ‘Caroline, No’ he had Hal Blaine hit the bottom of an empty plastic water bottle; other times, he used tape to mute the strings on a small grand piano.”

“With Pet Sounds, I was amazed that Brian could, first of all, have four different parts in mind. It’s hard enough to get one down and hold onto it while you’re singing, hearing three other parts. But he’d have four and five-part chords in his mind and dish them out to all of us and then take the top, which is the melody. It never ceased to blow my mind that he could know those notes and retain them.”

“No, not at all. Because look at where we've been able to go. The decision was something like this: I could go to college, do a career, work for 20, 30 years, then retire and go around the world — or (laughs) I could go around the world right away. And that's what we did. There's a lot of life experiences that I never would've had without The Beach Boys and our career. So, I never looked at it as if I missed anything. The music we made is the basis of our popularity today. The music itself never gets old. From our earliest days, it had variety in moods, tempos, instrumentation, subject matter, and melodies. The rotating lead vocalists added a pleasing but unpredictable variance and texture. The music is now part of our country’s DNA.”