Brian’s songs

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Brian Wilson sits on a plush couch in his living room, smiling nervously. On the Beach Boys visionary’s back porch, his family’s 15 pooches yip and scramble over each other. Inside, photos of his children with wife Melinda Ledbetter – 11-year-old Daria, 10-year-old Delanie and 4-year-old Dylan – lace the walls.

The two-story house, snuggled deep into a gated hillside community, is immaculately clean, with beige carpeting and marble floors. Housekeepers tidy up downstairs. A swimming pool overlooks the sun-drenched valley below. It all resembles a postcard.

“I’m happier now than I was a year ago,” Wilson says. “I started exercising and I started eating more of the right food and I started feeling better. I just get up in the morning and say my prayers.”

Gangly and tall in a pinstriped dress shirt, his graying hair swept back into waves, the wizard songwriter behind such ’60s Beach Boys hits as “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls” stares with sharp blue eyes, frequently fidgeting.

A lot has changed for the historically reclusive Southern California native, who speaks with a slight slur, a result of his drug-abuse past and medicated journey through mental illness.

He is a second-round father at age 66. (Musician daughters Wendy, 38, and Carnie, 40, from his first marriage, tour as The Wilsons.)

Following 2004’s long-awaited rock opera, “Smile,” and a 2005 Christmas release, he has a new, ambitious solo album, “That Lucky Old Sun,” due out Tuesday. He is touring behind the material, pushing through years of stage fright.

“I think the new album is just as good as anything the Beach Boys ever recorded,” says Wilson. “Playing these songs live, I feel proud.”

Two years ago, Wilson says, he recorded 18 songs, then chose 10 last year for Capitol Records/EMI. He came up with the album’s lush orchestration and music, while 43-year-old bandmate Scott Bennett wrote the lyrics, with colorful narrative interludes by longtime Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks.

The outcome is a blend of uptempo pop and piano-based ballads. The title track, a cover of Louis Armstrong’s “That Lucky Old Sun,” flows into the bouncy anthem “Morning Beat,” setting the album’s tone.

Songs such as “Forever She’ll Be My Surfer Girl” touch on Beach Boys melodies, while “Mexican Girl” adds a dash of salsa flavor.

“Midnight’s Another Day” and “Oxygen to the Brain” reference Wilson’s dark days in the ’70s and ’80s, when he receded from the spotlight into isolation, drugs and weight gain.

Wilson calls “Midnight’s Another Day,” which revolves around a solitary piano melody, his favorite song, “kind of introspective, kind of how I feel around people.”

The final song, “Southern California,” reminisces about co-founding the Beach Boys in 1961 with his late brothers Carl and Dennis, and ends the album on an uplifting note. Wilson sings, “It’s magical/ Living your dream.”

“Yes, Brian had a rough time of it, with his mental health, but I would kill to have the kind of catalog he does, and tour everywhere with his brothers like he did,” says Bennett, who confirms that Wilson “is on a heavy dose of antidepressants.”

Inspiration comes at night, when Wilson sits down alone at his Yamaha synthesizer and grand piano in his purple-curtained music room.

“When I go to the keyboard, I feel holy, like an angel over my head,” he says. “When we did (the Beach Boys hit) ‘God Only Knows,’ I felt holy about that too. A godly something comes through me.”

He has less insight into his relationship with daughters Wendy and Carnie, who both live less than 10 miles away.

“I don’t talk to them very much. I used to. I recorded with them at one time, but I don’t talk to them a lot,” he says, explaining that they’re “really busy.”

Questions about the Beach Boys’ current status get a lukewarm response as well.

Wilson, who formed the band with his brothers, cousin Mike Love and school friend Al Jardine, split with most of the group’s surviving members years ago amid legal squabbles. Love and later Beach Boys bandmate Bruce Johnston tour as the Beach Boys Band, while Jardine has his own Endless Summer Band.

“We don’t want any publicity about me getting back with the Beach Boys, ’cause I don’t want to,” Wilson says.

“They’re not my group anymore. That’s Mike and Bruce’s group now. I’m on my own, and I would rather do that than go back to the Beach Boys.”

Wilson, though, clearly loves performing Beach Boys tunes as well as his own solo work – even with nightly stage fright, which he says he works through by getting neck and shoulder rubs, and praying.

After “That Lucky Old Sun,” Wilson says the unreleased songs he recorded, including a slow, smooth version of “Proud Mary,” will form another album.

He would also like to record “a rock ’n’ roll album inspired by Phil Spector-type records, a really hard rock album that really rocks, with big orchestration, the whole bit.”

But he’s taking things one day at a time.

“I look forward to today,” Wilson says. “I never look forward to the future because I think to myself, ’What if there’s an earthquake, what if I die or someone I love dies?’

“I get those kind of thoughts all the time. It’s ‘oof’ to my head.”