Lorde Reveals Past Struggle With Eating Disorder: ‘I Felt So Hungry and So Weak'
When Lorde hit the road in 2022 in support of her album Solar Power, she performed with a newfound sense of freedom. Psychotherapy treatments using MDMA and psilocybin had helped her overcome the stage fright she'd been grappling since she was a kid, allowing her to form new connections to her music and fans.
But at the same time, she reveals in a new Rolling Stone cover story, she was privately struggling with an eating disorder. Lorde starved herself, counted calories, monitored her protein intake, and obsessed over her size. Recalling a press event for Solar Power, Lorde told RS she remembers only feeling thin and worried that she would never be thin enough.
More from Rolling Stone
Lorde's Ultrasound Tour 2025: How to Get Tickets Online Before They're Gone
Lorde Says She's 'In the Middle Gender-Wise': 'I'm a Woman Except When I'm a Man'
Lorde: 'I'm an Intense Bitch'
'I felt so hungry and so weak,' she said. 'I was on TV [that] morning, and I didn't eat because I wanted my tummy to be small in the dress. It was just this sucking of a life force or something.'
Lorde said her eating disorder began during the pandemic and continued for several years, though it never reached a point where she began to look visibly unwell to those around her. This included during the Solar Power tour, as she grappled with the dissonance between her newfound joy onstage and her private struggles.
'I don't know how those two things can be true,' she said. 'That I'm having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids, and [yet] I'm also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become.'
Lorde's disordered eating continued after the Solar Power tour and into 2023, when her personal life was rocked further by a break-up with longtime partner Justin Warren. Along with the 'really fucking difficult' process of learning how to be alone, Lorde said she also came to realize that her obsession with thinness was controlling her life. The key to addressing her eating disorder was the moment she began to view her compulsions as a self-imposed mission to keep herself small.
'Once I stopped doing that, I had all this energy for making stuff,' Lorde said. 'I could see that if I cut that cord, maybe I would get something back that I needed to do my work. And it was totally true. Got it all back, and way more.'
What followed was an experience Lorde called 'the ooze' — a process of letting herself take up more space physically, creatively, and emotionally. This not only helped her find a more fluid and expansive gender expression but also fueled the creation of her new album, Virgin.
The album is imbued with a strong sense of physicality, with Lorde saying, 'I think coming more into my body, I came into an understanding of the grotesque nature of it and the glory and all these things. It's right on the edge of gross. I often really tried to hit this kind of gnarliness or grossness. 'You tasted my underwear.' I've never heard that in a song, you know? It felt like the right way to tell this whole chapter.'
Best of Rolling Stone
The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs
All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Watch Brian Wilson Play ‘California Girls' and ‘Good Vibrations' at His Last Concert
The devastating news that Brian Wilson has died at age 82 hit early Wednesday afternoon, and we're all in a state of shock. 'We are at a loss for words right now,' his family wrote in a statement. 'Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.' Wilson had been in failing health for quite a long time, and the family revealed he was suffering from dementia last year, requiring a conservatorship to handle his affairs. But it somehow seemed like he'd live forever after everything he'd survived throughout his long and difficult life. He was one of rock & roll's ultimate survivors, somehow outliving both of his brothers, Carl and Dennis, by more than a quarter-century. More from Rolling Stone Hear Neil Young Duet With the Beach Boys' Al Jardine Stan Love, NBA Player and Brian Wilson's Caretaker, Dead at 76 Al Jardine Is Going on Tour With Brian Wilson's Longtime Band In the late Nineties, Wilson stunned fans by hitting the road as a solo act for the first time in his career. He was backed at the shows by a group of Beach Boys super fans, the Wondermints, who lovingly recreated the lush, complex arrangements of the original Beach Boys recordings with amazing precision. 'We really wanted to do the music justice,' Wondermints multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory told Rolling Stone in 2024. 'I think everyone gave it their A-plus shot, and really focused, and really tried to emote, and tried to break down the fourth wall as much as we could. We wanted to make sure that we gave [Brian] as solid a bed as we possibly could so that he could thrive.' A couple of years into the run, they started playing Pet Sounds straight through with local symphonies. Shortly after that, they shocked the world by resurrecting Brian's lost 1967 masterpiece Smile, both on the road and in the studio. It was a peak moment that was impossible to top, but Wilson and the Wondermints continued to tour heavily practically every single year throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, pausing only for the brief Beach Boys reunion in 2012, and Covid in 2020. The final tour was a double bill with Chicago in the summer of 2022. It was a difficult time for Wilson, who often seemed distant and unengaged onstage, leaving his band — including original Beach Boy Al Jardine — to carry much of the weight. 'It was a little tough,' Gregory told Rolling Stone. 'We've seen that over the years, that sometimes he's really pumped and all there and ready to do a show. At other times he's scared and he's heard voices or he's just not feeling up to it. And I'm afraid to say that a lot of 2022 he wasn't feeling up to it…. People love to ring the bell and extol his virtues when he's on, and that's great. But when he's not engaged, it can seem really bad. And I feel bad for everyone. The audience, they want to get the good Brian, and we in the band want everyone to be pleased, but we can't control everything.' The last show took place July 26, 2022, at Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkson, Michigan. Like every show on the tour, it was heavy on Beach Boys classics like 'God Only Knows,' 'Good Vibrations' and 'Sloop John B.' But there were also deeper cuts, including 'Long Promised Road,' 'Sail On, Sailor,' and 'Wild Honey.' Check out fan-shot footage of 'California Girls,' 'Good Vibrations,' and several other songs from the show. It's sad on some level, since Wilson is clearly struggling, and he barely participates in 'Good Vibrations.' But take a look at at the joyous crowd perched near the stage, singing along to every word of those all-time classic songs and having a blast. Brian was dealt many difficult hands in life, including a brutish father and severe mental illness. But he spent the last few decades of his life watching music that he created spark joy in thousands of people, night after night. That's a pretty magical way to go out. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Brian Wilson Learns to Smile
This story was originally published in the October 14, 2004 issue of Rolling Stone. Brian Wilson is waiting in the driveway of his Mediterranean-style Beverly Hills house, dressed entirely in brown corduroy, bouncing on his toes. More from Rolling Stone Watch Brian Wilson Play 'California Girls' and 'Good Vibrations' at His Last Concert Brian Wilson, Beach Boys Co-Founder and Architect of Pop, Dead at 82 Hear Neil Young Duet With the Beach Boys' Al Jardine 'Let's go!' he says, jumping into the car. 'Go down here, make a U-turn, I'll give you directions.' His silvery brown hair is uncombed, and he's unshaven, in a relaxed, Sunday-afternoon way. His face is tan; his smile is gentle, easy. Wilson looks good. 'We don't have to introduce each other, because we've met before,' he says. 'So, how you been?' 'Good. How about you?' 'I'm good,' he says. 'I'm great. Doing a lot of work. It's a big relief — whew! — because, you know, I've been through some rough times in my head, but I've been fighting it off.' Wilson is more active now than he's been since the Beach Boys were America's top group in the mid-Sixties. He tours relentlessly with his superb band; he released a solo album this summer, Gettin' In Over My Head, with cameos from Elton John and Paul McCartney; and now he's preparing to put out what may be his crowning achievement: an entirely new recording of the legendary, unfinished Smile, which was scrapped in 1967 and has become the most famous unheard album in rock history. Launched as the follow-up to the Beach Boys' classic Pet Sounds— and in response to the Beatles' masterful Rubber Soul and Revolver— Smile was intended to be the grandest, most complex rock & roll production ever: a loosely themed concept album about coast-to-coast 'Americana,' from Plymouth Rock to 'Blue Hawaii,' built from modular, cut-and-paste fragments of pop melody, orchestral instrumentation, recurring vocal themes and even the sounds of crunching vegetables and barnyard animals. Wilson, then twenty-four, described his epic musical tapestry as a 'teenage symphony to God.' Wilson's ambition, however, was undercut by intensifying, untreated mental illness as well as by drug use (including hashish and amphetamines) and pressure from the other Beach Boys and the group's label, Capitol, to stop messing around and start cranking out hits. Beach Boy Mike Love was the harshest critic, reportedly calling Smile 'a whole album of Brian's madness.' Wilson's behavior became erratic and paranoid. His Smile collaborator, the lyricist Van Dyke Parks, remembers going into Wilson's swimming pool fully clothed for a business meeting, because Wilson was afraid his house was bugged by his controlling father, Murry. One night, while recording a section of his 'Elements' suite about fire called 'Mrs. O'Leary's Cow,' Wilson distributed plastic fireman's helmets to the orchestra and lit a small fire in the studio so they could smell smoke. Later, Wilson learned that a building near the studio burned down and that there had been several other fires across Southern California. Wilson believed his music caused the fires, and he immediately stopped work on the song and locked the tapes away in a vault. BY May 1967, after more than eighty recording sessions, Wilson's masterwork was unraveling, and so was he. Smile was abandoned. Its best tracks — 'Heroes and Villains,' 'Wonderful,' 'Surf's Up'— turned up on subsequent Beach Boys albums such as Smiley Smile; bootleggers tried to piece together the rest. Some say Wilson never recovered from the monumental disappointment of Smile's failure. 'He was a man so lonely and so abused and maligned, ostracized,' says Parks. 'It was an outrage what he suffered.' Today he won't say much about that time except that Smile 'was too far ahead of its time, so I junked it.' Until recently, he didn't seem interested in revisiting the work ('Bad music, bad memories,' he told me in 2001), but a year and a half ago, looking for a new live project, Wilson's wife, Melinda, suggested trying Smile, and his bandleader, Darian Sahanaja, began to organize the project. 'It took courage,' says Wilson over steaks and Heinekens at the Mullholland Grill, near his house. 'We worked on it little by little, week by week, until finally we got it right.' 'You can hear that Brian has a glimmer,' says Parks, who worked with Wilson on the new SMiLE (differentiated in typography from the original Smile). 'That is what I think is wonderful about this project… It bathes Brian in some real redemptive light. It shows that he is very generous and very talented, and that he uses his talent to console, in a powerful way.' Work on the new Smile began in the fall of 2003, Sahanaja showed up at Wilson's house one morning with all the existing fragments of Smile he could find (both from bootlegs and the Capitol vaults) loaded onto his iBook. 'I knew Smile is not Brian's favorite topic,' says Sahanaja. 'And he had a look, like he was looking over the edge of the Empire State Building with no support.' At first, Wilson offered little reaction. 'He was quiet for a long time,' says Sahanaja. 'Then I played him 'Do You Like Worms?' and I thought he was going to freak out. But he went, 'That's pretty cool. We did that?' And it just started going, grouping different sections and songs together.' To Sahanaja's amazement, Wilson began to remember harmonies and arrangements that were never recorded. At one point, they were working on a portion of 'Do You Like Worms?' (now renamed 'Roll Plymouth Rock'), and Wilson couldn't read Parks' thirty-eight-year-old lyric sheet. 'We just couldn't figure it out,' says Sahanaja. 'Brian goes, 'Van Dyke will know.' So he picks up the phone — hasn't called Van Dyke in years — goes, 'Yeah, Van Dyke. It's Brian. Do you know the song 'Do You Like Worms?' What's this line?' ' The next morning, Van Dyke Parks showed up at Wilson's house to begin five days of work. Parks says his main goal was to bring Smile out of the past, to make it the work of a man looking back at his younger days, not to try and simply re-create material thirty-seven years old. 'It was important that this not arrive irrelevant and brain-dead,' he says. Parks made mostly subtle changes. At the start of 'In Blue Hawaii,' for example, Parks added the line 'Is it hot as hell in here? Or is it me?/It really is a mystery.' 'These words reveal Brian in the present tense,' says Parks, 'reflecting on this situation that happened to him all those years ago.' The new SMiLE was first performed by Wilson on tour in the U.K. in February, to rave reviews, then recorded at Sunset Sound and Your Place Or Mine studios in Los Angeles. It wasn't always easy. 'Darian's a perfectionist — he henpecks me,' Wilson says. 'It's hard work, but it's worth it.' Adds Sahanaja, 'Sometimes Brian was a little impatient. He would say, What do we need to do next? When am I getting my steak?' Sometimes I think he would have rather stayed at home, and, technically, he didn't have to be there a lot of the time. But he showed up, and, man, it was such a difference. Just his goofy way. We'd do a really beautiful version of 'Surf's Up.' We'd get to the last chord, and we're all there with our headphones on and we'd hear him scream, 'Right the fuck on!' That's so inspiring for us musicians.' Tonight it's hard to tell how excited Wilson is about SMiLE, but he's definitely excited about dinner. 'They have an excellent salad here; I think you should get it,' he advises, then calls the waitress over and orders two iceberg-and-blue-cheese salads and two rib-eye steaks, medium rare. Wilson seems relaxed — or as relaxed as I've seen him in recent years — as he drinks beer and talks about his courtside seats to the Lakers playoff games and about his four-month-old adopted son, Dylan. (just saying Dylan's name makes Brian burst out laughing.) 'Life's better than it's been in the past twenty years,' he says. Still, he admits that he works hard to keep depression at bay. 'Every day I have an anxiety attack,' he says. 'I can't explain why. It just comes on.' He takes medication for anxiety and depression, and he sees a therapist three times a week. 'I'm in bad mental shape, so I need it,' he says. A routine of work and exercise helps, too. Each morning before doing anything else, he spends an hour at the piano. He says he's written three new songs in the past week. 'The creative process blows me out,' he says. 'It's an amazing trip. Amazing. Just amazing. I'm older, wiser, more knowledgeable than I used to be, so I can get it together pretty quick.' He smiles, stares off for a while, gulps his Heineken, then looks up at me with pale greenish-blue eyes. 'I'll tell you something I've learned,' he says. 'It's hard work to be happy.' Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Brian Wilson, Beach Boys Co-Founder and Architect of Pop, Dead at 82
Brian Wilson, who as leader of the Beach Boys and a founder of California rock invented a massively successful pop sound full of harmonies and sunshine, has died at the age of 82. 'We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away. We are at a loss for words right now,' his family wrote in a statement posted on social media. 'Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.' More from Rolling Stone Questlove, Clairo, Earthgang, and More Remember Sly Stone: He 'Was a Giant' Billy Jones, Baby's All Right Owner and Key Player in New York Music Scene, Dead at 45 Sly Stone, Family Stone Architect Who Fused Funk, Rock, and Soul, Dead at 82 Wilson's family did not provide a cause of death, but it was revealed in February 2024 that the Beach Boys legend was battling dementia. 'Brian Wilson, my friend, my classmate, my football teammate, my Beach Boy bandmate and my brother in spirit, I will always feel blessed that you were in our lives for as long as you were,' Al Jardine said in a statement to Rolling Stone. 'I think the most comforting thought right now is that you are reunited with Carl and Dennis, singing those beautiful harmonies again. You were a humble giant who always made me laugh and we will celebrate your music forever. Brian, I'll really miss you…still I have the warmth of the sun within me tonight.' 'Brian gave so much to the world through his music, his spirit, and his strength. He was a sweet, gentle soul as well as fierce competitor,' Wilson's longtime manager Jean Sievers said in a statement to Rolling Stone. 'There will never ever be anyone like him again. God truly broke the mold when he created Brian Wilson. Besides being a creative genius, he was one the smartest and funniest people I've ever known. His message of love will live on through his music forever.' Wilson's legacy includes dozens of ubiquitous hit singles with the Beach Boys, including three Number One singles ('I Get Around,' 'Help Me, Rhonda,' and 'Good Vibrations'). In the 1960s, the Beach Boys were not only the most successful American band, but they also jockeyed for global preeminence with the Beatles. And on albums such as Pet Sounds, Wilson's lavish, orchestral production techniques dramatically expanded the sonic palette of rock & roll and showed how the recording studio could be an instrument by itself. Born on June 20, 1942, Brian Wilson grew up in Hawthorne, California, a modest town next to the Los Angeles Airport. Brian was the eldest of three brothers; his younger brothers were Dennis and Carl. Their father, Murry, was an aspiring songwriter and a tyrant. 'Although he saw himself as a loving father who guided his brood with a firm hand, he abused us psychologically and physically, creating wounds that never healed,' Wilson wrote in his 1991 autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. Wilson grew up playing sports and obsessing over music, teaching his brothers to harmonize with him. Music was his sustenance and his solace, he said: 'Early on, I learned that when I tuned the world out, I was able to tune in to a mysterious, God-given music. It was my gift, and it allowed me to interpret and understand emotions I couldn't articulate.' In 1961, Brian, Dennis, and Carl formed a band with their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, managed by Murry Wilson; Brian played bass, took many of the lead vocals, and wrote the songs. Signed to Capitol Records and named the Beach Boys, they started to roll out hits like convertible Thunderbirds coming off an assembly line: 'Surfin' U.S.A.' (with music borrowed from Chuck Berry's 'Sweet Little Sixteen'), 'Surfer Girl,' 'Be True to Your School,' 'Fun, Fun, Fun.' Those Brian Wilson compositions all sounded like insanely catchy jingles for the California teenage lifestyle — surfboards, hamburger stands, pep rallies — but on the flip side of the good times was a real sense of melancholy. Sometimes that was apparent in the lyrics — the lonesome 'In My Room,' for example — and sometimes it was expressed nonverbally, with the Beach Boys' heartbreaking multipart harmonies. Wilson got more ambitious in his songwriting and experimented with new sounds — like the chunky surf guitar and falsetto lead on 'I Get Around.' But he buckled under the stress of touring, having a nervous breakdown on the road in Europe in 1964. He decided that while the other Beach Boys toured the world, he would stay home and work on perfecting new material in the studio: When the band came back to California, they would step in and lay down their tracks. The results included gorgeous singles such as 'California Girls' and the immortal 1966 album Pet Sounds. The album, which regularly ranks at or near the top of the best albums ever made (Rolling Stone named it Number Two in its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), was inspired by the Beatles' innovative work on Rubber Soul; in return, it inspired the Fab Four to new heights of experimentation on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul McCartney frequently cited Pet Sounds as a masterpiece, giving it particular credit for its innovative bass playing, and has called the aching 'God Only Knows' his favorite song of all time; 'God Only Knows' placed Number 11 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The album was orchestrated with instruments that included harpsichords, bicycle bells, and barking dogs. The culmination was 'Wouldn't It Be Nice,' with its lyrics yearning for an adult life and love. The other Beach Boys, particularly Mike Love, were not impressed by Pet Sounds, and Wilson considered releasing it as a solo record; as a Beach Boys album, it was only a middling success in the United States, although its influence was huge, and it was recognized as an instant classic in the U.K. Wilson followed up with the Beach Boys' finest single, 'Good Vibrations,' three-and-a-half thrilling minutes of electro-theremin and stacks of vocals, recorded over a period of six months in various studios at a cost that reportedly made it, at that point, the most expensive single in history. Wilson returned to the studio with plans to top himself: an album called Smile, which he told friends would be a 'teenage symphony to God.' Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, he started to assemble an elaborate collection of musical suites, intended to change the face of popular music, but the sessions fell apart, weighed down by the indifference of the other Beach Boys, Wilson's consumption of pot and LSD, and his growing mental instability. While recording 'Mrs. O'Leary's Cow,' a piece of the 'Elements' suite about fire, Wilson handed out plastic firemen's helmets to the orchestra and actually lit a fire in the studio to inspire them. When he found out that a building near the studio had burned down, he thought he had caused the fire through his music, freaked out, and locked the tapes in a vault. Wilson spent most of the next decade in his Bel Air mansion, which included both a recording studio and a sandbox in the living room (he put his piano in it so he could feel sand between his toes when he played). 'He was a man so lonely and so abused and maligned, ostracized,' Van Dyke Parks told Rolling Stone in 2004. 'It was an outrage what he suffered.' The Beach Boys continued without Brian Wilson; even as their album sales evaporated, they remained a popular oldies-oriented touring act. Over the following decades, Wilson would periodically rejoin the band and sometimes even tour with them, despite the intra-band lawsuits over songwriting credits and money. Wilson hesitantly stepped back into the public eye and started releasing solo albums, beginning with the 1988 cult masterpiece Brian Wilson, which had an executive producer credit for Wilson's longtime therapist, Dr. Eugene Landy. From the outside, Landy — who was first hired by Brian's wife Marilyn in 1975 — seemed like a positive influence on Wilson. He played a pivotal role in getting Wilson to curb his excessive eating and drug intake in the late Seventies and early Eighties. But as the Eighties wore on, the therapist slowly seized control of nearly every aspect of Wilson's life. By the end of the decade, Wilson was forcibly secluded from his close friends, family, and bandmates. 'There was a total parallel between [Brian's father] Murry and Landy,' Wilson's second wife, Melinda Ledbetter, told the New York Post in 2015. 'Because Brian came from such dysfunction, it was hard for him to recognize how dysfunctional the situation with Landy was.' (Landy died in 2006.) It took a 1992 lawsuit filed by Wilson's family to finally remove Landy from his life forever. In the aftermath, Landy lost his license to practice therapy. Right around this same time, Wilson's daughters, Carnie and Wendy, formed two-thirds of Wilson Phillips, a vocal trio that sold 10 million copies of their 1990 debut album. Wilson performed with his daughters on I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, the soundtrack to a 1995 documentary about him. That same year he released Orange Crate Art, a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks. Smile's legend had only increased in the decades since it was abandoned; it was considered the great lost rock album and even inspired a time-travel novel (Lewis Shiner's Glimpses) where the protagonist persuades Wilson to complete the album. Although songs, including 'Heroes and Villains' and 'Surf's Up,' had made their way piecemeal onto Beach Boys albums, it was generally assumed that it was impossible to piece together the shards of Wilson's masterpiece. In 2004, however, against all odds, Wilson completed the album; in a five-star review, Rolling Stone said it was 'beautiful and funny, goofily grand.' (Wilson's Smile later landed on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.) Wilson had found his way to something that once seemed impossible: a happy ending. 'I'll tell you something I've learned,' he confided to Rolling Stone in 2004. 'It's hard work to be happy.' The album earned Wilson his first-ever Grammy Award, as the LP's 'Mrs. O'Leary's Cow' — the song that sparked Wilson's meltdown decades earlier — won Best Rock Instrumental Performance. In 2012, Wilson reunited with the Beach Boys for That's Why God Made the Radio, the band's first album together since 1996; the LP peaked at Number Three on the Billboard 200, their highest-slotting album since 1965. Wilson also embarked on a tour with the Beach Boys. Both the album and the tour marked the end of his Beach Boys tenure. Over the past decade, Wilson would release two more albums: 2015's No Pier Pressure, featuring guests like Kacey Musgraves and She & Him as well as Beach Boys bandmates like Al Jardine, David Marks, and Blondie Chaplin, and 2021's At My Piano, a collection of newly recorded instrumental versions of Beach Boys classics. That same year, Wilson was the focus of the documentary Long Promised Road, in which the singer reflected on his past and legacy. The soundtrack for that film also yielded what would be the final new song Wilson released, 'Right Where I Belong,' a collaboration with My Morning Jacket's Jim James. Wilson, along with the Beach Boys, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Upon his entry into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2000, Paul McCartney — who delivered the induction speech — called Wilson 'one of the great American geniuses,' and thanked him 'sir, for making me cry.' Wilson also received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2007 for his contribution to music. In February 2024, just weeks after the death of Brian's second wife and longtime manager, Melinda, Brian's family revealed that the singer was suffering from dementia, and a conservatorship was sought to secure his continued care. 'This decision was made to ensure that there will be no extreme changes to the household, and Brian and the children living at home will be taken care of and remain in the home where they are cared for,' the Wilson family statement said at the time. 'Brian will be able to enjoy all of his family and friends and continue to work on current projects as well as participate in any activities he chooses.' 'Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear,' Wilson told Rolling Stone in 1988. 'Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that. Goddamn!' Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
