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 well-liked animated sequence “The Ren & Stimpy Show” and “SpongeBob SquarePants,” died Wednesday in hospice care in Colchester, Vt. He was 72.
His loss of life was introduced by a consultant, Bob Merlis, who mentioned the trigger was most cancers.
A performer himself who led a mid-’70s power-pop combo together with his youthful brother Jonathan, Paley was broadly credited with serving to to shepherd Wilson again into musical relevance within the late Eighties when he produced the Seashore Boys founder’s debut solo album. Recorded amid Wilson’s controversial therapy by psychologist Eugene Landy, 1988’s warmly reviewed “Brian Wilson” opened with the track “Love and Mercy,” which offered the title for director Invoice Pohlad’s 2014 biopic specializing in Wilson, Landy and Wilson’s second spouse, Melinda (who died in January).
Two years after the Wilson LP, Paley oversaw the soundtrack of Warren Beatty’s Oscar-winning adaptation of “Dick Tracy,” writing songs in a Thirties-ish fashion and assembling a diversified forged of artists to carry out them; among the many acts featured have been Ice-T, Erasure, ok.d. lang, Brenda Lee, Darlene Love, Take 6 and Al Jarreau.
Each the Wilson and “Dick Tracy” initiatives have been the results of Paley’s relationship with Sire Information founder Seymour Stein, who employed Paley to be a workers producer on the label. Paley went on to make information there with John Wesley Harding and the Mighty Lemon Drops earlier than helming a would-be comeback album by Lewis known as “Young Blood” in 1995.
Paley was born Nov. 2, 1952, and grew up within the small city of Halfmoon, N.Y., “with a population of 50 and 200 cows,” as he instructed The Occasions 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 Fashionable Lovers and Speaking Heads.
“I never got a diploma and maybe I didn’t pay attention in some of the classes, but I definitely paid attention to Darlene Love, and I paid attention to Brian Wilson,” Paley mentioned in 1990. “That’s what I really cared about.”
Andy and Jonathan Paley fashioned the Paley Brothers in 1976; the band opened exhibits for each Shaun Cassidy and Patti Smith and reduce a single for Sire with producer Jimmy Iovine. The Paley Brothers launched an LP in 1978 and teamed with the Ramones to cowl Ritchie Valens’ “Come on Let’s Go” for the subsequent yr’s “Rock ’n’ Roll High School” film. In line with Merlis’ announcement, the brothers additionally labored with Phil Spector at L.A.’s storied Gold Star studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, the place the Seashore Boys recorded parts of “Pet Sounds” and “Good Vibrations” and the place Spector developed his so-called Wall of Sound approach within the early Nineteen Sixties.
After the Paley Brothers broke up, Andy Paley joined Smith’s touring band and started producing different acts. He labored on soundtracks for films 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 track “Best Day Ever” is featured within the SpongeBob musical that opened on Broadway in 2017. Paley and Kenny additionally carried out in a bunch known as the Hello-Seas.
In 2017, Paley collaborated with Victoria Meyer, an environmental scientist at Southern California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on a set of songs impressed by the ’60s French pop fashion referred to as yé-yé. Final yr, he took half in a Fiftieth-anniversary tribute to the influential “Nuggets” garage-rock compilation at Glendale’s Alex Theatre.
Paley’s survivors embrace his spouse, Heather Crist Paley; their sons, Jackson and Charlie; his sisters Sarah, Brewster and Debby; and his brother.
As a producer, Paley didn’t have “a signature thing that I do,” he instructed The Occasions in 1990. “I just want the thing to sound good, whatever it takes. The main thing I can say about any project is to have a vision of what the ultimate product is going to be in your head. That end carries over into everything, even to questions like, ‘Should they order lunch now?’”
