The Beach Boys mark their 50th anniversary in 2012 with a long-awaited reunion tour, and it’s only natural for music writers to want to commemorate the occasion with new material about “America’s Band.” Toronto-based journalist Mark Dillon’s offering is a fun, unique, and worthwhile contribution to the constantly expanding Beach Boys bibliography.

The key difference between Fifty Sides  of the Beach Boys and traditional biographies is its construction, and this is exactly the thing that will delight Beach Boys fans. Dillon has interviewed 50 people connected to the band and asked them each to talk about one song. Readers are treated to reminiscences and reflections from an impressive roster, including the surviving members of the Beach Boys, contemporaries like Alice Cooper and Dean Torrence, and younger fans like Zooey Deschanel. These interviews are combined with original research to create a chronological history of the band through its music.

Hardcore fans will be pleased with Dillon’s focus on the process of writing, recording, and developing each song. The author’s wide-ranging interviews and in-depth research faithfully reconstruct the dynamics surrounding the notoriously volatile band, and show readers how the group’s roller-coaster moods and ever-changing lineup were reflected in its music. Casual fans will recognize references to the sunny harmonies of the band’s early career, but Dillon does not ignore the darker, more obscure work of the late 1960s and early ’70s. It’s covering this period, while the Beach Boys struggled to retain cohesion, that the book really shines. Where a standard biography might emphasize the group’s fragmented, directionless interpersonal relationships, by choosing to focus on the music, Dillon imbues his story with more richness.

Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys combines the best aspects of biography with a true fan’s attention to musical detail. Mostly, though, Dillon has delivered an enjoyable, highly readable account of one of the most iconic rock and roll bands in American history.