What Love Can Do by Brian Wilson

Album: New Music from an Old Friend (2007)

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Songfacts®:

This song was included on a Target album New Music from an Old Friend, where several well-known artists, including Brian Wilson, did a new recording of an old song, and then laid down one new tune.
Singer-songwriter Tonio K found himself collaborating with two music legends when he penned this song with Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach. Tonio had taken on the Hal David role with Bacharach on a number of other tunes, but this was the only time either of them had written with Brian Wilson. Speaking with us in a 2013 interview, Tonio told us how this one-off collaboration came about: "He and Burt, I don't know if they even knew each other," he said. "They must have said hello over the years at one function or another, but he and Burt I think were seated at the same table at some Grammy function and someone at the table was going, 'Hey, have you two guys ever written a song?' They went, 'No, actually. We've never written a song together.' And I think Melinda, Brian's wife and kind of manager aide-de-camp put it together.

So one day Burt called me up and he goes, 'Hey, I'm going to write a song with Brian Wilson. First time I've ever written with him before. Do you want to write the lyric?' I went, 'Oh, gee, let me think about that.' So anyway, we did.

But Brian had a verse, melody, and background harmonies, which are really cool. Some real Beach Boy kind of background stuff that he already had. He was hoping Burt would come up with a great Burt Bacharach '60s chorus, which Burt did. I'm sitting around with my legal pad, looking at the two of them on a piano bench working it out at Burt's house, and I said, 'Burt, you know me well enough to know I don't do this, but I'm sitting here looking at Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson sharing a piano bench as we're writing this song. I've got to have a picture of that. Are you guys okay if I bring a camera tomorrow?' [Laughing] This was pre iPhone. They went, 'Sure.'

I don't do that, but that one just struck me as something no one was ever going to see again, and I needed to get a picture of it."

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