It is a phenomenal tour de force of songwriting greatness exploding in every direction at once. Whereas Wildflowers does not reflect madness, or an artist unmoored from the harbor with no clear destination. There’s little question that Brian Wilson walked that line when creating “Good Vibrations,” which was more like the creation of the Sistine Chapel paintings than that of a hit single.

Which is not unusual in the creation of the greatest art. Yet in that opus, there’s some undeniable madness at play. What he did is similar to Michelangelo, who, when asked to add some art to the Sistine Chapel, proceeded to paint its entire ceiling and walls with the fullness of his genius, overflowing with creativity. He wrote “You Wreck Me” to Mike Campbell’s chords, but the words and melodies all came from him. To pack so much artistry and expression into that one space was evidence of artists unchained in their abilities.īut while The White Album was the result of four songwriters separately writing a lot of material, Wildflowers came from Tom. That remarkable abundance of material for The Beatles became a double album–the first and only one ever by this band–and revealed that their creative powers were sparking at full capacity. Its formation was not unlike that of The Beatles White Album in its profusion of songs in every side, shape and color–short simple songs, complex epics, traditional, expermental, rockers, ballads, funny, sad–a whole universe way too expansive for any conventional LP.

Wildflowers, when under construction, was too small of a frame to contain the fullness of his creation. For Wildflowers, he tapped into the source so directly that a multitude of songs flooded out of him in a veritable torrent of creative energy. When creating it, he’d already ascended to that mythic ‘Toppermost’ of which The Beatles spoke, and done so repeatedly with remarkably authentic, heartfelt real-time rock and roll, forever evolving but never abandoning that essential fire.

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