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Brian Wilson's 10 best tracks (and the stories behind them)
The legendary genius behind The Beach Boys has left behind an incredible legacy of music... here’s our pick of the best
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Brian Wilson has died at the age of 82, and will be remembered as one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th Century, as well as a mercurial genius who battled mental health problems - and the industry - to create pop masterpiece after pop masterpiece.
Here are some of his very best tunes - this could just be entirety of Pet Sounds of course, and there’s so many more, but this is the agonised choice in the wake of Wilson’s passing.
10. Surfin’/Surfin’ Safari
The first two Beach Boys singles. The band formed in Hawthorne, California after Brian - a fan of harmony groups and rhythm and blues music coming through the radio - began using reel-to-reel recording equipment to record songs as a teenager in the late Fifties. He recruited his younger brother Dennis and Carl to help him, soon to be joined by cousin Mike Love - later Brian’s nemesis - and friend Al Jardine.
Dennis, the only one of them who surfed, suggested they should write songs about the burgeoning teenage surf culture scene in the US, catered to by the likes of Dick Dale. Brian wrote their first single Surfin’, which attracted the attention of a record company, who released it and changed the band’s name from The Pendletones to The Beach Boys. Surfin’ remains an excellent stripped back bit of doo-wop, all young buck glee and sunshiney joy.
It did ok but next single Surfin’ Safari was a huge hit. Co-written with Mike Love (we may as well say now that in the Nineties Love sued Wilson and retrospectively had his name co-credited on many Beach Boys hits) and came about after Wilson tried to do a Chuck Berry song. It’s still a piece of frothy teen joy.
9. In My Room
Fast forward to 1963 with this ode to Brian’s happy/sad place, not on the beach partying, but holed up at home where he was free to dream of recording music as good as The Beatles’. Which he did. By this stage, The Beach Boys had scored a mega-hit with Surfin’ USA and Wilson took the chance to take over the production and the writing of their records. He had taken to holing up in the studio for hours on end. In My Room was sung by Wilson and showed his melancholy side, a world away from their joyful pop image. It is perfection, about depression and sensitivity, and self-soothing; things teenagers also knew a lot about.
8. Surfin’ USA
The early and still indelible mega-hit, which had a second life in the 80s after featuring in Teen Wolf. But really, it has never gone away. It is pure teen exuberance, catchy as hell and acted as a kind of unifying song for kids coming of age in the post-war boom of the American Sixties; one where they could afford cars, clothes and records. It was based on Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen but counts as a Wilson credit for his inspired arrangement and lyrical flourishes: ‘Bushy bushy blonde hairdo’ etc.
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7. Wouldn’t It Be Nice
The album Pet Sounds from 1966 was inspired by The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Wilson’s attempts to match it with “the greatest rock album ever made.” It was also inspired by his marijuana and LSD use, as well as the ‘Wall of Sound’ work of Phil Spector. Intended as more of a suite of music rather than just a collection of songs, it was the true start of Wilson being considered a genius; not just the experimentation into new forms, but all the eccentricity - and obsession - that goes with the idea.
Despite it being one piece of work, the individual songs stand alone more than fine, like the opening track Wouldn’t It Be Nice. The sonic space is enormous, the vocal and instrumentation lush and smooth, and its ode to wishful thinking, the mutual fantasy of marriage, is just a beautiful thing. This is one of the songs that Mike Love later successfully secured credit on, despite not being physically present during its writing with Wilson and co-writer Tony Asher.
6. Heroes and Villains
So after Pet Sounds, and after the single Good Vibrations that’s when it all started to go wrong for Wilson. The follow-up album - started the same year, 1966, as those landmark releases, such was the pace of creation at the time - was called Smile and was set to take the Beach Boys’ music to even more ambitious heights with a concept album about American history, with a mash of high and low styles, with Wilson describing it as a “teenage symphony to God.” By this stage he had been regularly seeking enlightenment with heavy LSD trips but also trying to capture bad trips on record, as with the track The Elements: Fire, but began to get spooked about the “witchcraft music.” He had made everyone wear fireman’s helmets during the recording and filled the studio with smoke. But when he heard a local building had burnt down, he thought it was his fault and stopped the recording.
Periods of psychosis started occurring. Mike Love didn’t like what he was doing with Smile and told him so. The album was shelved, and Wilson’ slide into reclusiveness began, as did the voices in his head. He had a breakdown. Smile became a legendary ‘lost’ album.
But then, in 2004, with the help of a team of fans and collaborators, Wilson returned to Smile and performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and later released it as Brian Wilson’s Smile. Despite his continuing mental health battles - detailed in an accompanying documentary - he toured the world again.
Heroes and Villains is one of the most loved tracks from the record. Children love this song because of Fantastic Mr Fox. Who couldn’t love this song? A symbolic cowboy fantasy but delivered in joyful abandon.
5. California Girls
The very best of the surf songs, it is simply too good. From that iconic instrumental opening to the world-beating chorus, this can’t fail to bring a smile to your face. It was written in 1965 when the band were on the road and the shy Wilson was meeting lots of girls. He wrote it on LSD and wanted it to sound like cowboy film music, with that trotting rhythm. He said it was his own favourite Beach Boys track.
4. I Get Around
This is not a surf song, it’s a car song! And the best car song every written. It’s all about freedom and friends and the long days of youth that never seem to end. Nobody captured joy as well as Wilson, it was innocence as an ideal, something which chimed with the Sixties perfectly when the young aimed to take over the world.
3. Don’t Worry Baby
The Who’s Keith Moon used to play this on a loop at his home as he was sliding into alcoholism and it has that kind of tragedy to it. Where you’re trying to soothe somebody and that somebody might be yourself. It’s about a boy who gets pushed into a drag race and is consoled by his girl... ‘don’t worry baby, everything will turn out alright.’ Wilson sang this one too, and its a heartbreaker, one of those narrative songs that the 60s girl groups pioneered - ‘Be My Baby’ was the inspiration - but also transcending that staple to be a melancholy love song where sex and death loom large, yet it remains the sweetest things you’ve ever heard.
2. God Only Knows
Repetition at wedding discos has somewhat taken the sheen off through the years, but listen to it afresh once in a while and it takes your breath away. Just one of the best love songs ever written. It’s on Pet Sounds and has a spiritual grace and sincerity that is untouchable, at least this side of Good Vibrations.
1. Good Vibrations
This is one of those moments where words fail and you should just go listen to the track.
But just to round off the conceit of this list, this was the single that followed Pet Sounds and was a huge critical and commercial smash on both sides of the Atlantic, the very high watermark for Wilson before he started on Smile. It still sounds astonishingly ambitious and the making of it is a book-length story; at the time it was the costliest single ever made and took the longest time.
It’s not a song, it’s a pop symphony about drugs, mysticism, enlightenment and, yknow, just hanging out with people while off your face. The good things in life, in other words.
God bless you, Brian, what marvellous sounds you made for us.
 — Mets pitcher Kodai Senga, the major league ERA leader, will be placed on the injured list after straining his right hamstring in Thursday’s 4-3 win over the Washington Nationals. %23kodaisenga)
