Wild Honey

Wild Honey is the thirteenth studio album by American rock band The Beach Boys, released on December 18, 1967 on Capitol. Self-produced by the band, Wild Honey was the second consecutive Beach Boys album since Surfin' USA not to give sole production credit to Brian Wilson, who had gradually abdicated the band's musical leadership following the difficult sessions for the aborted Smile LP. Despite this, the album is said to be primarily a Brian production.
The title track became the first single, a minor hit with only a short chart stay. Its follow-up, "Darlin' ", reached the US Top 20, while the album itself (the last Beach Boys LP to be released in both mono and stereo, or in this case duophonic quasi-stereo) reached #24 in the US and #7 in the UK. The track "Here Comes the Night" was later redone as a disco song in the late 1970s but was not a hit. "How She Boogalooed It", co-written by Al Jardine, Mike Love, Bruce Johnston and Carl Wilson, was the first Beach Boys non-instrumental original not to be written or co-written by Brian Wilson.
The closing track, "Mama Says", is a chant that originated from an unreleased incarnation of the composition "Vegetables". It was the first of tracks with thematic links to Smile used to close a later Beach Boys album.
In 1990 Capitol Records reissued Wild Honey on a Beach Boys double CD with Smiley Smile and bonus tracks including an alternate version of "Heroes and Villains" that contains the 'cantina section', two incomplete versions of "Good Vibrations", "You're Welcome", "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring", and "Can't Wait Too Long". This printing of the CD also included in-depth liner notes by David Leaf, as well as previously unreleased Smile session photos by Jasper Dailey.
The colorful image featured on the front of the album sleeve is, in fact, a photograph of a small section of an elaborate stained glass double-window that adorned Brian and Marilyn Wilson's house in Bel Air. Although the Wilson family no longer owns that property, the window itself was removed when they moved out and is currently to be found in Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford's present house.
The name "Wild Honey" derives from the album's lead single. Mike Love explained the idea for the lyrics of the song in a 1992 issue of Goldmine:
"Brian was doing this track with a theremin and we were doing the song. I went into the kitchen and we were in this health food thing and wild honey was all natural. So there's this can of wild honey and we're making some tea. So I said, I'll write the lyrics about this girl who was a wild little honey. And I wrote it from the perspective that that album was Brian's R&B-influenced album, in his mind. It may not sound like it to a Motown executive but that was where he was coming from on that record. In that particular instance I wrote it from the perspective of Stevie Wonder singing it."