His recent Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You album found Dev Hynes, aka Lightspeed Champion, emulating Todd Rundgren at his most excessive and baroque.

It's no surprise to find the Great Arranger of his era tackling the Great American Songbook; but sadly, the absence of surprise also applies to the bulk of the treatments here, which err on the side of schmaltz.

C W Stoneking is a one-off eccentric of the first order, a 21st-century Australian white man who presents himself, colouration excepted, as a black American minstrel from a century earlier.

Former NYU room-mates Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus began life as a muck-about band who, inspired by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks' Smile, locked themselves into an expensive studio they could barely operate.

Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, broke through in the UK as a solo artist in 2007 with his third album, Person Pitch. Then last year his band Animal Collective performed the same feat with their latest neo-psychedelic LP, Merriweather Post Pavilion. In the meantime, Lennox has become a much in-demand collaborator.

On Fight Softly, The Ruby Suns leader Ryan McPhun goes it alone, writing, performing and producing these 10 songs virtually solo.

The rehabilitation of Brian Wilson was heartwarming, but the rebirth of Daniel Johnston will melt the cockles.

It's doubtful whether soul music is supposed to be this wimp-voiced or nerdily obsessive, but 29-year-old bedroom auteur Hawthorne – who writes, produces and plays many of the instruments himself – has created a deliciously vulnerable sound and persona that's as close to the Brian Wilson of "In My Room" as it is to Marvin or Smokey.

Drowned in surfer pop

Talk of the town

He is one of the towering geniuses of popular music, and the creator of some of the most memorable records of all time. But life has not been easy for Brian Wilson. And, as John Walsh discovers, interviewing the great man is no simple task either ...

Singer-guitarist Steven Page has left the Barenaked Ladies.