"Brian Wilson (Live)" (Barenaked Ladies)

My sophomore year roommate at UNC listened to Barenaked Ladies nonstop.  Luckily, I found them refreshing.  They lacked the angst-y/poseur-y bull crap that half the bands on rock radio embodied in the late 90s.  (Have I mentioned that I wasn't such a huge fan of 90s mainstream rock?  Maybe I have...)  They also had a knack for catchy melodies, lyrical wordplay, and close vocal harmonies, making them sound like no one else out there at the time.
The band's live album, Rock Spectacle (1996), made an appearance at least once a week in our dorm room.  While my roomie and his girlfriend enjoyed the goofy folkiness of the sing-along "If I Had $1,000,000," I always anticipated the more serious "Brian Wilson."
The song "Brian Wilson" was written by vocalist/guitarist Steven Page, a founding member of the band who actually left to pursue a solo career in 2009.  It's an extended metaphor, using both blatant and slightly obscure references to The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, detailing a creative drought that Page experienced around his 20th birthday in 1990, when melodies and lyrics just weren't coming to him.  
When he wasn't staring at the ceiling of his basement bedroom to pass the time, Page was making late night trips to Sam The Music Man (a music mega-store that went belly-up in the digital music age) on Toronto's Yonge Street, just to try and get inspired.
As the lyrics convey, he obtained a copy and began listening, over and over, to The Beach Boys' album Smiley Smile (1967)--an album that consisted of a mishmash of tracks from Brian Wilson's abandoned pop symphony, SMiLE.  Eventually, he started seeing parallels between his own inability to write and Brian Wilson's 1967 mental breakdown, referencing in the song's chorus Wilson's years-long, self-imposed exile from writing and performing: Lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did...
(He also references Wilson's controversial therapist, Dr. Eugene Landy, who from the mid-70s to the early 90s controlled literally every aspect of Wilson's life--sleeping, eating, shtupping, writing, recording--ostensibly to get Wilson off drugs and in a better frame of mind.)
The original studio version of "Brian Wilson," released on the 1992 album Gordon, is good, but it's lacking a certain spark that comes through in the live version.  In particular, Page's voice is more expressive, and the frenzied coda really delivers the feel of coming unhinged.
Quite simply, it's a smart song from a smart band.