Twelve of Brian Wilson's greatest songs – from surf to psychedelia and beyond

The Guardian

4 days ago

Although co-written with Gary Usher, this reflective hymn to isolation was pure Brian autobiography, conceived as the pressures of pop success loomed. 'I had a room I thought of as my kingdom,' Wilson said, 'somewhere you could lock out the world.' The domain in question was the Wilson family's music room where Brian slept 'right beside the piano'. Part-inspired by the Charms' 1956 doo-wop hit Ivory Tower, which the Wilson brothers sang themselves to sleep with, In My Room sonically recreates Brian's feelings of sanctuary by blending his brothers' sweet-sad harmonies with finger cymbals, harp glissandi and Santo & Johnny-style Sleep Walk guitar. Soothing yet eerie, the song spoke to the nation of 60s teenagers whose only refuge was their bedroom, and whose worries and fears all waited for them outside that door.
Only Brian Wilson could hear the Ronettes' Be My Baby and think it lacked a sense of dread. Originally written for Ronnie Spector and co as a sequel to their 1963 pop hit, Don't Worry Baby was finally recorded by the Beach Boys and released as flip-side to the exhilarating Saturday night cruisin' anthem I Get Around. Both are car songs but Don't Worry Baby taps into the shame and insecurity behind the A-side's masculine braggadocio. A love song told in the third person, with the girlfriend's titular words of reassurance sung in the high vulnerable falsetto of their fearful recipient, Don't Worry Baby is also one of Brian's finest productions, the longing and reassurance of the lyrics echoed in both the group's lush vocal arrangements and the warm click of Al Jardine's Fender Precision bass.
Conceived while Brian was playing the piano in the wake of an acid trip, this knowing throwback to the group's early Chuck Berry-style list songs like Surfin' Safari and Surfin' USA is the sound of teen naivety realigned by LSD. A lyrical collaboration with Mike Love, it's a song that exists as both high art and disposable pop. Note how its divinely beautiful proto-psych opening bars – with those twin electric 12-string guitars played in chamber echo – give way to Al De Lory's almost comical roller-rink organ, or the way the vocal harmonies on that 'I wish they all could be California girls' chorus come with a note of weary disenchantment, as if to say: I've been around the world and had my fun but I'd just like to go home now.
Simultaneously a work of artistic maturity and emotional anguish, God Only Knows captures the duality of Brian Wilson's genius better than any other Beach Boys composition. Lyrically, the song's opening two verses are a cumulative denial of love, a declaration of eternal love, a surrender to the heavens and a kind of emotional threat ('If you should ever leave me … '). Nothing is simple here, least of all the music. From the intro's union of french horn, piano and bells that suggest both sacred and sentimental to the angelic, interweaving harmonies that convey everything from contented sigh to delicate apprehension, God Only Knows is the pop song as exalted state, a transformative ineffable experience where euphoria and despair are one and the same.
Once described by Brian Wilson as 'my whole life performance in one track', this psychedelic Rhapsody in Blue took eight months, and cost nearly $70,000, to record. Well, it was worth it, wasn't it? Recorded as six separate movements in four studios, Good Vibrations is boy-girl pop as abstract cut-up. Rooted in the simple idea of a young man spying a woman from afar, it blossoms into a swirling sonic puzzle whose miraculous beauty can be broken down into constituent parts – the ghostly female vocal of Paul Tanner's electro-theremin, those throbbing primal cellos, the boys' wordless, choir-like harmonies that turn lust into a prayer – but never fully comprehended.
What is with that opening? Those four bars of Jerry Cole's detuned 12-string guitar that sound like a child's music box and then the cold thud of Hal Blaine's snare drum? Well that's the song: naivety and hope v the slammed-shut door of reality. Brian and his co-writer Tony Asher wrote the lyric from the perspective of a teenage boy dreaming of a serious relationship with a woman: standard 60s pop sentiments. But the rhetorical nature of those lyrics, the semi-mocking tone of Mike Love's middle eight ('Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray, it might come true') and Brian's key changes and tempo shifts lend the song a curiously introspective tone. Yes, it's bright, happy radio pop and you can always hear it as that, but it's one where the dream is forever out of reach.
What price genius? Here is the answer. Working with the Mississippi-born poet and songwriter Van Dyke Parks in a fevered attempt to top Good Vibrations, Brian set about transforming a Marty-Robbins-style country ballad into an overstuffed, wild west operetta that became a sonic encapsulation of Brian's own encroaching paranoia. The song went through dozens of variations before Parks was fired over 'indecipherable' lyrics, and a shorter, rougher incarnation was recorded for 1967's Smiley Smile. Although dismissed by Jimi Hendrix as 'psychedelic barbershop', it now sounds stranger than ever, a baroque layering of weird instruments and complex vocal harmonies hurtling towards a mournful second half that signifies both artistic contentment and psychic exhaustion.
A cornerstone of 1967's unfinished Smile project, Surf's Up is an abstract three-part suite lovingly reassembled by brother Carl for the Beach Boys' album of the same name in 1971. Overdubbed with Moog synthesiser bass, and Carl's 1971 vocals perfectly blending with Brian's original 1966 take, the finished LP version is an undeniable masterpiece. It moves with stoned certainty through florid 19th-century imagery heavy with portent, before repurposing a line from an 1802 Wordsworth poem – 'the child is father to the man' – into a beautifully multilayered song of innocence and experience that repeatedly reflects back upon itself until it vanishes.
Written in an hour-and-a-half at his Bellagio mansion, following a sudden late-night feeling that 'the whole world should be about love', this speedily recorded paean to global happiness, less than two minutes long, might be one of the most uplifting songs Brian ever wrote. On the one hand, it's rooted in loneliness and insomnia, centred on the pointed and painful line 'but when they leave you wait alone'. Yet the way the harmonies weave in and out of each other and the keys repeatedly take the song on different pathways feels so adventurous and optimistic that joy is undeniable. It's one thing for a lyric to remind you that you're 'happy 'cause you're living and you're free' but it's another for the song itself to actually make you feel that way. That's genius.
Effectively a solo LP, with Brian producing and playing keyboards, synthesisers and drums, 1977's The Beach Boys Love You is one of the stranger recordings in the group's back catalogue. Yet, among the endearingly lo-fi songs about Johnny Carson, the solar system and 'honking down the highway' is this heartbreakingly fragile tune. Over quacking synths and synthetic chords, a vocally ravaged Brian and Dennis trade verses about losing out to the other man before Carl comes in on the bridge, insisting 'Don't you ever tell me that you're leaving' – his soaring vocal sounds like the angelic Beach Boys of bygone years. The result is a small moment of bittersweet perfection that captures Brian and the group between joy and despair.
A semi-autobiographical song influenced by Jackie DeShannon's 1965 version of Bacharach and David's What the World Needs Now Is Love, and bound up in Brian's own desire to 'give love to people', this vulnerable benediction begins in the real ('I was sitting in a crummy movie with my hands on my chin') with Brian despairing at the state of the world ('A lot of people out there hurtin'') before realising that he has the power to bestow compassion on the world. If only through multitracked harmony vocals. Like This Whole World, it's a song that notices a lack of something in the world while simultaneously filling that lack, an exuberant secular blessing from a pop god.
With their references to Surf's Up, Pet Sounds and such early melancholy Brian compositions as The Warmth of the Sun and Surfer Girl, the final three tracks on the last Beach Boys studio LP work as a kind of mournful valedictory suite. Lyrically, the individual songs – From There to Back Again, Pacific Coast Highway and Summer's Gone – reference familiar Beach Boys themes of sunshine, California and dreams of escape but shot through with thoughts of mortality and death. 'Sunlight's fading and there's not much left to say,' he laments on Pacific Coast Highway, and it's one of the finest songs about the acceptance of old age and the loss of inspiration. Arranged and produced by Wilson, the suite is as warm, poignant and wistful as a summer sunset, a quiet acceptance of beauty in its final dying moments.