AVC: You don't feel like you've already done that?
BW: No, I haven't.
AVC: What do you think has come closest?
BW: "California Girls."
AVC: Is that your favorite Beach Boys song?
BW: One of them.
AVC: How will you try to beat Phil Spector now if you haven't done it already?
BW: Well, I make better drums than he did. And I can make a better wall of sound than he can. I'm just babbling on here. Actually, he inspires me a lot to make a rock 'n' roll album, not to outdo or be as good as him, but to be influenced and inspired by him. That's something I still get off on.
AVC: Is he still the one you think about as the greatest that ever was?
BW: Yeah.
AVC: Do you know him?
BW: No, actually ever since 1984, when I went to his house one time with my doctor, I haven't seen him or heard from him for about 22 years now.
AVC: What was that visit like for you?
BW: I was scared. I was really in awe of him, and very, very scared. I was going, "Oh man, I don't know if I can deal with this!" Then I said, "Yeah, you can, yeah you can." We were there for about a half hour.
AVC: What did you guys talk about?
BW: We talked about the possibility of him producing me on an album and we said, "Well, we don't know yet." We never got back to him on it, so it never happened.
AVC: What was he like?
BW: What is he, like 5'6"? He's a little guy. His house is very dimly lit and very scary and eerie. That's just Phil Spector. Phil Spector is an eerie person.
AVC: Was he still making music at that point?
BW: When I saw him in 1984, he told me that when John Lennon died, he never did anything in the studio anymore. He produced John Lennon, right? Remember "Instant Karma" and all those songs? "Across The Universe"?
AVC: How would you describe the way you hear music? There's so many parts in Beach Boys songs that come together to make totally different sounds.
BW: That's how Phil Spector did it. That's what I learned from Phil Spector. To make songs echo and stuff like that, to combine piano and guitar to make one sound. Combine horns and strings to make another sound, strings with voices to make a sound. There's all kind of possibilities in the studio.
AVC: Are those ideas you had in your head, or did you experiment in the studio?
BW: I spent many years experimenting in the studio, very many years.
AVC: Do you still play every day?
BW: Oh yeah, I play piano every day, at least twice a day.
AVC: What do you play when you're by yourself?
BW: I try to write songs.
AVC: How often do you write new ones?
BW: Once every two or three weeks, I'll have a little bit of a starting melody. I can't get a song finished lately, for some reason. I don't know what it is.
AVC: What's different about the days when you're able to finish a song?
BW: Well, I wake up in the morning and I say "Ahh! Today's the day for a song! I'm going to write a song today!" And I do. I write a song.
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