Andy Paley, a prolific musician and producer who labored on information by Brian Wilson, Madonna, Jonathan Richman and Jerry Lee Lewis and who wrote music for the favored animated sequence “The Ren & Stimpy Show” and “SpongeBob SquarePants,” has died Wednesday in a hospice. in Colchester, Vermont. He was 72 years previous.
His demise was introduced by a consultant, Bob Merlis, who stated the trigger was most cancers.
An artist himself who led a mid-’70s power-pop combo along with his youthful brother Jonathan, Paley was extensively credited with serving to return Wilson to musical relevance within the late ’80s, when he produced the album solo debut from the founding father of the Beach Boys. Recorded throughout Wilson’s controversial therapy by psychologist Eugene Landy, the warmly reviewed 1988 movie “Brian Wilson” opened with the music “Love and Mercy,” which supplied the title to director Bill Pohlad’s 1988 biopic 2014 centered on Wilson, Landy, and Wilson’s second spouse, Melinda (who died in January).
Two years after the Wilson LP, Paley oversaw the rating for Warren Beatty’s Oscar-winning adaptation of “Dick Tracy,” writing songs in a Thirties type and assembling a various solid of artists to carry out them; artists featured included Ice-T, Erasure, kd lang, Brenda Lee, Darlene Love, Take 6 and Al Jarreau.
Both the Wilson and “Dick Tracy” initiatives have been the results of Paley’s relationship with Sire Records founder Seymour Stein, who employed Paley as a employees producer for the label. Paley continued to make information there with John Wesley Harding and the Mighty Lemon Drops earlier than helming a possible Lewis comeback album known as “Young Blood” in 1995.
Paley was born on November 2, 1952, and grew up within the small city of Halfmoon, New York, “with a inhabitants of fifty and 200 cows,” as he instructed the Times in 1990. His three older sisters uncovered him to rock music, and after dropping out of highschool he moved to Boston, the place he began a short-lived band known as The Sidewinders that additionally included Jerry Harrison, who went on to play within the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads.
“I by no means bought a diploma and perhaps I did not concentrate in some lessons, however I undoubtedly paid consideration to Darlene Love and I paid consideration to Brian Wilson,” Paley stated in 1990. “That’s what actually mattered to me.”
Andy and Jonathan Paley fashioned the Paley Brothers in 1976; the band opened exhibits for each Shaun Cassidy and Patti Smith and minimize a single for Sire with producer Jimmy Iovine. The Paley Brothers launched an LP in 1978 and teamed up with the Ramones to cowl Ritchie Valens’ “Come on Let’s Go” for the movie “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” the next 12 months. According to Merlis’ announcement, the brothers additionally labored with Phil Spector at Los Angeles’ historic Gold Star studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, the place the Beach Boys recorded elements of “Pet Sounds” and “Good Vibrations” and the place Spector developed his so-called Wall of Sound Technique within the early Nineteen Sixties.
After the Paley Brothers broke up, Andy Paley joined Smith’s touring band and commenced producing extra exhibits. He has labored on film soundtracks together with “Shag,” “Wild Orchid” and “A Rage in Harlem” and wrote songs for “SpongeBob SquarePants” with actor Tom Kenny, who voices the present’s title character ; their music “Best Day Ever” is featured within the musical SpongeBob which debuted on Broadway in 2017. Paley and Kenny additionally carried out in a gaggle known as Hi-Seas.
In 2017, Paley collaborated with Victoria Meyer, an environmental scientist at Southern California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on a sequence of songs impressed by the Nineteen Sixties French pop type generally known as yé-yé. Last 12 months, he took half in a fiftieth anniversary tribute to the influential garage-rock compilation “Nuggets” on the Alex Theater in Glendale.
Paley’s survivors embrace his spouse, Heather Crist Paley; their youngsters, Jackson and Charlie; his sisters Sarah, Brewster and Debby; and his brother.
As a producer, Paley did not have “one factor that units me aside,” he instructed the Times in 1990. “I simply need the factor to sound good, no matter it takes. The foremost factor I can say about any venture is to have a imaginative and prescient of what the ultimate product can be in your head. This demise impacts every little thing, even questions like, “Should they order lunch now?”
