After collecting and watching most of the documentaries on him, I immediately began to try to figure how I could extract soundbites from the interviews in those documentaries.
A friend of my daughter's showed me how I could do it. For countless nights, I sat hunched over my computer, with the DVD remote in one hand and the mouse in the other, extracting and editing bite after bite of anything I felt I might could use for the project. What I had originally intended as a single-disc compilation quickly mushroomed into a four-, then five-disc affair.
As for tying the soundbites to the songs: I did the track sequencing long before I started extracting the soundbites from the documentaries. So, after I got the soundbites, it was just a matter of playing around with them and figuring out which bites went best with what song or track. Some of them were obvious, like Brian's mention of Surfer Girl or Linda Ronstadt talking about In My Room.
My main goal with this project is to portray Brian as the ultimate survivor. If you listen to his songs, they tell the story. The soundbites are just the icing. Linda Ronstadt summed it up nicely when she talked about In My Room, how "these were deep, profound emotions that came from a lot of pain, and there's nothing shallow about it." Brian's music (and life story) has touched a lot of people, myself included. I think of this as a tribute to his genius; not in the intellectual sense, but his gift of expressing complex emotions through music.