Oh well, twice bitten. When Brian Wilson came to Vancouver in 2005 to present Smile, the Straight’s Martin Turenne took every writer’s nightmare—a lousy interview—and built an exquisitely sensitive feature around it. With Wilson, lousy takes on unique dimensions. There isn’t much you can do with 10 minutes of terse, two-word answers, but you also can’t ignore the profoundly sad background that led up to the uncomfortable nonconversation you’re having, with a man whose talents, troubles, and overall myth are all unfathomably deep.

Plus, it just feels invasive. He doesn’t need this, does he? He’s Brian Wilson. Naturally, people want to see him play. And aren’t his off-road energies better spent simply keeping his shit together? This isn’t something I write frivolously. I was directly in front of Wilson at the 2005 Smile concert, and I got an up-close look at the former Beach Boy at work. It was a magnificent night, but I saw the frequent, terrified glances he threw at bandmate Darian Sahanaja. It left the strong sense that Wilson’s war against an ever-encroaching psychic hell is an exhausting, full-time effort.

Seeing him at the meet-and-greet afterwards reinforced the impression, as we were efficiently trundled in and out by an imperious handler to stand with Wilson for a photograph. When he wasn’t hoisting a mechanical smile for the camera, Wilson looked like he was in agony. But he wasn’t vacant or crazy or helpless, and he certainly wasn’t anything like the calamitous six-foot toddler I saw with the Beach Boys at a 1990 concert in Calgary, when he announced to 50,000 horrified people that absent vocalist Mike Love was dead (the two were feuding over royalties).

In other words, Brian Wilson today is a significantly healthier person than he was around the time of his big, touted comeback in the late ’80s. But he’s not so great on the phone. Partly because we’ve been gently cautioned by his label to keep within a narrow range of topics, Wilson’s answers sound routine and slightly impatient. When I go off script a little, he either misunderstands or doesn’t respond. Looking back on Smile, and the historic pall it cast over Wilson’s life until he finally completed it in 2004, he says, “Oh yeah, that was a tough one to make. That was a rough album to make.” Forty years of unimaginably painful rough that formed the very cornerstone of his legend, as a matter of fact. How did it feel to get it out of his system? “It just, it opened the doors of music in my mind, you know?” he answers.

This, I suppose, is as good a cue as any to ask about Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin, his new and warmly received album of songs by the great American composer. Two of its tracks—“The Like in I Love You”, and “Nothing but Love”, both charming—were completed by Wilson and multi-instrumentalist Scott Bennett from unfinished recordings given to them by the composer’s estate. Wilson says that becoming George Gershwin’s newest writing partner, 74 years after his death, is “right up there” with the other achievements in his life, “like Pet Sounds”. Doing the project was “a thrill. I was proud to present him to the public.”

It’s a fetching record, and he deserves to be proud. Wilson and his breathtakingly deft collaborators do a mostly inspired job of meshing these two towering if very distinct giants, whether it’s wrapping “You Can’t Take That Away From Me” around the chugging rhythm of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, or opening the album with an almost a cappella rendering of the overture from “Rhapsody in Blue”, something that was surely meant to mirror “Our Prayer”, from Smile. “No, it just happened that way,” Wilson demurs. “It was an intuitive thing. We weren’t really thinking about it.” The album highlight is “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ”, cunningly arranged to recall the Pet Sounds era of tack piano, glockenspiel, and harpsichord, and therefore designed to drive any and all Wilson-heads totally ape.

Which is where Wilson’s musical partners come in. Made up of essentially the same personnel that walked him through the resurrection of Smile, the Brian Wilson Band has kept its boss busy and even-keeled ever since, meanwhile providing him with a permanent Wrecking Crew. Speaking of which, how does Wilson feel they stack up to the legendary L.A. session players that worked on those mothballed Smile sessions the first time around, in the late ’60s? “They’re better, yeah,” he says. “They’re just better musicians. They play better, sing better. The young guys are really hip.” Well, that much is certainly true, and here’s hoping that painfully awkward publicity opportunities don’t discourage anybody from seeing them.

In 2005, Brian Wilson came to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and put on the kind of show you talk about for the rest of your life. As nervous as he was up there, he was in total command, performing flawlessly with a bright set of musicians whose love and awe were palpable, and who would deserve our attention even if they weren’t trucking around the world with a bona fide genius. Up there on-stage, or behind the glass at the studio, working with people of this calibre and sensitivity—Brian Wilson belongs in these places. On the phone, speaking from L.A. to a disembodied voice in Vancouver? Not so much.

Brian Wilson plays the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Tuesday (June 28).