If you were to ask hardcore Beach Boys cultists what they want more at this point — a boxed set devoted to the cult-classic “Love You” album, or a very belated release of the shelved “Adult/Child” album recorded after that — it might very well be a draw. Fortunately, fans will be getting both at once. A new boxed set, “We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years” will be out from Capitol/UMe on Feb. 13, commemorating material both heard and (mostly) unheard from the group’s fruitful mid-1970s period.
The collection will also include outtakes from the “15 Big Ones” album, which, although not generally as well-regarded as “Love You,” was a commercial comeback for the Beach Boys at the time and their biggest album of the 1970s.
Rather than being released as separate CD and LP editions, “We Gotta Groove” will combine both in one package, with 3 compact discs and three vinyl LPs, including all of the tracks on the CDs and a more limited amount of the songs on the vinyl. Altogether, it will sport 73 tracks, 35 of which are previously unreleased and 22 of which are newly mixed.
The set’s title track, a previously unreleased song from the “Love You” sessions, has just been released in advance of the full collection coming next month. The song “We Gotta Groove” was written and produced by Brian Wilson — who had taken the reins of the Beach Boys’ recording sessions again at that time in the mid-’70s — and has Wilson providing most of the instrumentation as well, with Mike Love on lead vocals. (Billy Hinsche plays guitar and sings backup on the number, while Wilson’s plethora of instruments incluldes Baldwin electric harpsichord, drums, tack upright piano, Hammond B-3 organ, electric bass and tambourine.)
A 40-page booklet included in the 12.75″ x 12.75″ slipcover will feature extensive liner notes — and fresh interviews and archival interviews with the group and other participants — with by Beach Boys historian Howie Edelson, who co-produced the set with producer/mixing engineer James Sáez.
Universal Music
“Adult/Child” has a mythological status among some fans of the group, with bootlegs having widely circulated. Those tracks have been newly augmented. The announcement for the project says that the forthcoming set “finally assembles the material in a coherent album sequence for the first time, supplemented by new 2025 backing-track mixes and session highlights. The group’s distinctive vocal blend, including prominent contributions from Mike, Al, Carl and Dennis, adds warmth and cohesion to Brian’s idiosyncratic material, revealing ‘Adult/Child’ as more of a Beach Boys project than its mythology has often implied,” referring to how it has sometimes been characterized as a lost Brian solo album.
“Love You,” from 1977, is presented in its original mix. Brian Wilson’s heavy use of synthesizers for much more basic, even DIY-sounding arrangements than his Wrecking Crew sessions of the ’60s has been a source of fascination and enjoyment for nearly a half-century now. Al Jardine has recently taken Wilson’s touring backing group, the Pet Sounds Band, out on the road and performed the “Love You” album nearly in its entirety, to ecstatic reactions from serious Beach Boys aficionados, many of whom regard it as their best post-1960s recording.
Edelson sums up the album’s enduring reputation in the liner notes: “Upon the initial release of ‘The Beach Boys Love You,’ non-believers picked up on the D.I.Y. punk ethos from the Lower East Side all the way to the hipper enclaves across Europe. Today, Brian Wilson’s left field use of keyboards in the 1970s is considered to be an early influence for 1980’s New Wave, Synth Pop, and New Romantic record makers.”
The “Love You” CD included in the set tags 10 outtakes on to the short original album, including covers (“Ruby Baby,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”), the aforementioned “We Gotta Groove” and other heretofore unreleased originals, and alternate mixes of “Johnny Carson” and “Love Is a Woman” (the latter with Jardine switched in as lead vocalist).
“Adult/Child” is presented as a nine-track album, with most of the songs never officially released, except for “It’s Over Now” and “Still I Dream of It.” Four backing track mixes are added on, along with eight unrelated tracks from 1974-77 included as bonuses on the CD version.
The original version of “15 Big Ones” is not included in this set, unlike the original “Love You.” Instead, what’s collected here to represent that album is primarily fresh 2025 mixes of that album’s released and unreleased cover songs. Further rounding out the third CD are alternate mixes of select “Love You” album tracks and, intriguingly, nine of Brian’s cassette demos.
Beach Boys buffs are hoping this set will have been worth the long wait. It has been rumored for years, and anticipated ever since the last boxed set from the group, “Sail on Sailor,” came out in 2022, covering their early ’70s era.
On the night before the boxed set comes out, the Grammy Museum will host an evening that has compilation producers Edelson and Sáez due to talk with the original Brother Studio engineers, Stephen Moffitt, Earle Mankey and John Hanlon, about the sessions of five decades ago.
