I've been waiting impatiently for [Surf's Up] since Sunflower, and the small letdown I feel could be the other side of that impatience, the wish that they could have kept it a little longer to make it perfect. In this case that would not be a matter of production … but rather of waiting for the material to even out in quality….

Still, I recall my own first reaction to Sunflower, some cuts at first seemed too thin, too light.

But the important thing about the Beach Boys is just this aspect of their music. The production is usually flawless and the melodies so frequently exquisite that one tends to hear, then listen for—and finally dismiss it as—surface. Yet the surface is manipulated so carefully and so brilliantly that (and here I am forced by a certain poverty of analogy to shift senses) it becomes hologrammatic. Cotton...