Al Jardine of the Beach Boys on Doing a Rare Solo Project, 'Islands in the Sun,' and Fronting Brian Wilson's Road Band for Upcoming Tour (EXCLUSIVE)
Is Al Jardine still just at least a little bit boyish, at 82? Yes, he is, with both the small and big B. Although this 60-year-plus veteran of the Beach Boys has not toured or recorded under that umbrella for a while, he has continued to wave the group's flag as an integral member of Brian Wilson's touring ensemble. And now that Wilson is effectively retired, Jardine is picking up the mantle by going out on the road fronting the same band that made the Boys' music sound fuller and lusher than ever, now dubbed the Pet Sounds Band. But with rehearsals still in progress for the first set of shows, Jardine has surprise-released a new digital EP, "Islands in the Sun," out today via Universal. It's his first all-new solo release since 2010's "Postcard From California," which, remarkably, was his first studio album out on his own ever. Jardine has never been one to barge into the limelight when he could be assuming a more supportive role with Wilson or the Boys, and just occasionally stepping in front with lead vocals on songs from "Help Me Rhonda" to "Honking Down the Highway." But the most faithful fans of the group are bound to get considerable pleasure out of hearing Jardine assert himself as the lead guy for the length even of a short record. More from Variety Neil Young Slams Elon Musk and 'Fascist' Tesla Drivers in New Single, Announces First Album With Chrome Hearts San Luis Obispo Film Festival to Feature Neil Young, Daryl Hannah and Jay Duplass Neil Young, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers Joining Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Anti-'Oligarchy' Rally in L.A. Even here, he seems content to share the lead position, bringing in a few famous guests. Neil Young pops up for a duet, as he did on Jardine's previous project, with Flea making a trumpet cameo on that same track. Other guests include fellow Beach Boy Bruce Johnston and son Matt Jardine, who handles some lead vocals in the touring unit. In this interview on the eve of the release of "Islands," Jardine talked about working with those figures, picking up loose song threads from decades ago, taking over leadership of Wilson's tour band, and the tantalizing promise of a forthcoming boxed set rounding up some of the Beach Boys' 1970s work (which he plans to highlight on tour). There are a lot of fans who really love the sound of your voice. You've done so little solo stuff, it feels possible that maybe your fans love your voice more than you do, or something. I don't know. Really? Oh, come on. Thank you. But when I think of great voices, I think of (Michael) Bublé and those guys that have that amazing skill. Oh, God… Pavarotti — good lord. You know? But we can't go there. We're just Beach Boys. Why do you think it was maybe not so important to do your own solo albums before, and what has given you the itch to do a bit more of that now? That's a darn good question. Well, this one in particular, the lead-off song, "Islands in the Sun," is something that's been brewing for quite a while, and it's gone through a lot of iterations, and I had to re-record pretty much the whole track from start to finish over a period of many years. So these are like catch-ups. When you're in a massive recording group like the Beach Boys in your career, with our incredible inventory of music, there are so many things you left on the shelf that there simply isn't time to do your own things, let alone get ready for the next Beach Boys project. In my case, 50 years have gone by, which is hard to believe, or 60 in some cases, and there's still songs that I think are pretty reasonably worth the time to finish them, and so I've gotten around to finishing a few things. I don't know why it's only an EP, to be honest with you, because I do have so many more things, and Idohave time to finish them now. So this is a sample, I guess, of things to come. Why were you drawn back to finish the song "Islands in the Sun," which you have Bruce Johnston and your son Matt singing on? And how far does that one go back, in its origins? It was originally intended to be a song for our "Stars and Stripes" album [in 1996], which was a country album, and I tried to sneak it in. I said, "Carl, why don't we try something new? Instead of doing country-Western…" But it was a star-studded country album, so it was the wrong time to release "Islands in the Sun." We happened to be in the studio, and we cut it in about five minutes and went home, and it stayed on the shelf. That's how it evolves in our world. It has to do with my love of the Caribbean and the sound of calypso — it's Beach Boys, calypso and Harry Belafonte kind of all married together in my brain. Originally when I was a folk singer, I heard Belafonte do a song called "Island" — singular — "in the Sun." It was beautiful, and I almost would call it a folk song. Well, calypsoisabout folk people in that area. Anyway, it made me think about replicating that vibe married to a Beach Boys vibe, similar to "Kokomo." In fact, I found my voice again. Which is nice, because I didn't even know I had a baritone voice. And now people will accuse me of trying to be Mike Love, because he was always our baritone. So now I'm reliving the Beach Boys and Belafonte, with a little Bob Marley thrown in too. "Highway 101" is your adaptation of Leiber & Stoller's "Smokey Joe's Cafe," which you've said was a favorite song in your youth. You had the idea to recast that in a different setting? I called Mike Stoller, who wrote the music for "Smokey Joe's Cafe," because if you know the song, you can't help knowing that it's a derivative of that, so I thought I should get his approval. So I had a chance to hook up with him after all these years. It's amazing that we're all still around. And I just love it because it's kind of a very ballsy, bluesy kind of version with a nod to "Smokey Joe's" while telling a nice little storyline about what we did as teenagers. We'd all go down to Tijuana after graduation or some crazy thing like that, and so I just expanded it to Rosarita Beach Café instead of Smokey Joe's cafe, and he liked it. But he said, "Send me the lyrics." I said, why? He said, "So I can understand it." because you know, they go by pretty quick. We'll get together and have lunch and have a a good old time. On a very different note, "My Plane Leaves Tomorrow" features Neil Young and Flea on a song that seems to have a wartime setting. We know Neil's part was done at the same time you did another song with Neil for your previous album back in 2010. It's interesting hearing his distinctive voice over the top of a gentle rhythm that's more akin to what you do, just the novelty of that tone in such a different setting. And it sounds light, but it's got a heavy lyric. Mm-hmm. We were wrapping up and I said, "Hey, would you mind putting these lyrics on this other tune I'm working on?" And he said, sure. He was so easy to work with, so pleasant. And he had the most beautiful microphones, I mean, the best stuff, obviously. And he just went in there and he laid 'em down in such a mellow, extraordinarily easy way. I thought, boy, that sure carries the sentiment of someone going off to to war — and, you know, sometimes you don't come back. It kind of gives me chills thinking about it. I think he carried it beautifully. And then Flea of all the people in the world is playing "Taps." Trumpet is his first instrument, I think. I was a bugler in the Boy Scouts. That's kind of crazy, but you know, someone has to do it. I was the quarter master, and that was one of my duties. So we kind of hooked up in a funny way, huh? Anyway, I got really lucky with those two, and that's my favorite, to be honest with you. It just really gets me. Because we're always so close to going to war with Iran and that area of the world, or the threat of it. It's kind of derivative of an old folk song called "All My Sorrows." If you were to listen to that, you would hear some of the melody in there. It was a beautiful, beautiful Kingston Trio tune, but derivative again of an earlier song. A lot of stuff goes so far back, we don't even know who the writers really were. The other song on the EP is "Crumple Car," a song that appeared in the surf-themec movie "Big Wednesday." It's pretty much just your voice and acoustic guitar picking. Not knowing the movie that well, I assume this arrangement is different from how it sounded there? It's pretty close. All I did was I added a whistling solo in the middle, and a chorus. The original didn't have really a chorus; it was just used as background to the boys going surfing. It didn't sound like a surfing song, but more kind of one of those things you all know and you sing together going to the beach. But it wasn't a full song, so I added certain elements to give it kind of a surf-folk thing. There's a new genre for the Grammys — surf-folk. It's a very spiritual song in a way, because it really is about a very, very precious area of the California coast that the Chumash think is kind of a gateway for the supernatural, to the next world. Isn't that interesting? I didn't know that until I read a letter from one of the writers, Danny Albert, who wrote to me and said he loved my version of this. He said it's his favorite version, and he wanted me to make it available. My lead guitarist, Eddie Carter, who has been on all the early Beach Boy bands from inception, recommended that I re-record it. That particular story, to me, in "Crumple Car," is haunted and beautiful. This little rusty car becomes a symbol almost of a kind of an ecological movement. It gives it an aura of drama too, which makes it interesting with all those oil derricks out there. Who knows when the next bill's gonna be (about allowing or disallowing the derriks). "Where will my people go?" — (that applies to) the surfing people and the Chumash. Let's talk about your upcoming touring. On the itinerary that is just going out, speaking of California, we don't see any actual west coast dates on here, which all your fans in L.A. and thereabouts would hope for. Is this tour that you're doing in the summer kind of a test run, to see if you can buil up and do a larger tour later on? Yeah. I call it a pretest. When we made records in the old days — well, everything is the old days now —we actually hired people to pretest our singles, with an audience, to see if the label would get behind it and promote it. Well, this is kind of the same way. Since Brian is not touring anymore, I'm hiring the Brian band, but I can't use Brian's name. So we decided to call it the Pet Sounds Band. Well, people don't really know who the Pet Sounds band is, so we have to start from scratch and see if it works. I just heard we sold out a venue in Phoenix for a couple of nights, and got an offer to come back there in December, so that's a good sign. We're sporadically adding dates as we go along and even got an offer to go to Australia, which is amazing. And I think about it, because they really don't know who we are, other than… You know, I do describe it in my publicity that this is "the Brian Band" — as many as we could get gather together. That will make so many people happy because, obviously, we're not gonna have Brian out there touring this music anymore. No, yeah, I know. But the band is so good. Yeah, they're so damn good. … So you think other people are excited about it? They are. And the last time you and Brian played the Greek with the band, it was hard not to think: There is a way this could go on beyond Brian. You don't want to say that just anybody could be up there singing with them, but the band is so good, there've got to be ways to keep this going indefinitely, somehow. I thought the very same thing. Why should it not? You know, we had the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. As long as the talent, the will and the ability is still there. Almost everybody… 90% of everybody's coming back. You're calling it the Pet Sounds Band, and next year is the 60th anniversary of that album. Do you expect to be commemorating it? It hadn't even occurred to me, to be honest with you. I was just looking for a name for the band that people would recognize as being who they are. And then I was reminded about this 60th and I went, "Holy cow. Geez, we'll go out and just play the 'Pet Sounds' all over again" (in 2026). I don't know if there's a market for it, but we'll see. Although we've done it a lot, why not? At least the highlights from it. This year we are supporting the UMG release, a boxed set coming out this fall with "The Beach Boys Love You" (the group's 1977 cult album) on it. So that encourages them to promote the tour, which is nice, to be getting a little collaboration there. So we might actually get some bookings for '26 out of this, which would be very helpful. Because the band wants to keep working, because we love Brian's music… including the more esoteric stuff, like this boxed set, which has unreleased music from the "Love You" album, which hardly anybody probably has ever heard, and "15 Big Ones." So there's a lot of stuff in there that we can educate people about, because we can actually perform it, which is pretty remarkable. There's some serious music in there. It was exciting to hear not just that you were touring, but that you will be doing some of the little-played stuff from the mid-'70 era this particular boxed set represents. Because "Beach Boys Love You" is my favorite Beach Boys album… Are you serious? Of course. For some of us, for some reason, that one is dearest to our hearts. That's amazing. May I ask what your favorite songs are on it? Or which you would prefer to lose if you had your druthers? Well, this is not just because you sing lead on it, but speaking honestly… just as a lifelong thing, once you've heard it, it's hard to ever stop humming "Honking Down the Highway." Ah, man, that is great. Well, listen to my version of it on "Postcard from California" and you'll hear how I added a baritone saxophone solo in it, by the sax player from the Billy Joel band… and that's the version we're gonna try to do this summer. Plus, I'll be singing Mike's lead on "Roller Skating Child," and my son Matt will do "The Night Was So Young." Darian Sahanaja, the musical director, wants to do "Johnny Carson," of all things. And "Airplane," that's the other big one. That gives us some breadth and depth. … Brian, he is so quirky about everything, and that's why the album is interesting to you, because it's quirky. Everything about it is so interesting. And very few people… I'm impressed that you even know about it. And the album that came before it, "15 Big Ones," which is also part of the box… will you be playing anything from that on tour, too? Yeah. It's gonna be crazy. I'm gonna need a three-hour show or something. Right now our first dates are in casinos, and we have some outdoor shows, which are always restrictive to time, if there are other people on the show, so I'm not sure how much we're gonna be able to get done on those first few shows. I think we'll definitely be able to plumb a few extras. I'm thinking about "15 Big Ones," and songs like "Rock and Roll Music." There's one that I haven't even heard since we recorded it, called "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Bill Haley and the Comets. That was one that never made the album. I found a lyric sheet for it sitting in a pile of trash just the other day, which is kind of weird, on a nice legal pad. There weren't any background parts with Bill Haley, except they were shouting the theme. But we had many background parts worked out that I had written out, and I'm going, "Holy tamale, I've gotta hear this again." I even took a picture of the lyrics for the boxed set so they could see it, because you don't often see stuff like that of ours written out. Anything else you could share about the boxed set? Yeah, there's an unreleased album called "Adult Child." I haven't even heard the songs on it for 50 years, or at least 30, so I hope they send me an approval box. It was supposed to come out after our last Warner Bros. release — maybe it was after "Love You" that it was supposed to come out — but we rejected it, or somebody rejected it, either us or the label. Incredible stuff on there. You're going to be really pleased. Best of Variety What's Coming to Netflix in June 2025 New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? Sign up forVariety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram.
Al Jardine of the Beach Boys on Doing a Rare Solo Project, 'Islands in the Sun,' and Fronting Brian Wilson's Road Band for Upcom...
