Pressure's off and now life's a beach for Californian Carlisle

The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson... they're part of my DNA," says LA-born pop star Belinda Carlisle.

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And while there's no Brian Wilson-penned track on her new album, the singer has paid tribute to her home in Once Upon A Time In California, a dozen songs which aim to capture the “sounds of her youth”.

“It's weird because I started thinking about the album (in) 2017 and started demoing around then 2018, then the pandemic happened, and that ate up two years, and it just sat on the shelf,” she says.

“And then, because I was living in Thailand at the time, I was having to commute from Bangkok, which is 27 hours. It just took forever to get done.