Brian Wilson, a two-time Grammy Award winner and steward of ecstatic, sobering pop music, died last Wednesday at the age of 82. Immediately, every social media feed imaginable flooded with anecdotes, poems, YouTube links, pull quote screenshots, and photos. Oh, goodness, all the photos. It is impossible to truly articulate what losing Brian means to me, or to you—to all of us, really. He was my Mozart, my Jesus Christ, and my Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. If Bob Dylan taught me how to live, then Brian Wilson taught me how to love. His songs followed me always and forever will, in antique mall display cases, radio mixes, movie syncs, and a portion of my aging soul reserved just for him. I will never touch God. Yet, in the company of Brian’s pocket symphonies, I know the divine’s shape. I can taste what’s eternal when his work is the fruit before me.
The last time I cried—like, really cried—was at my best friend Jessi’s wedding in November. There she was, in her long, white gown, inching towards her sobbing, handsome fiancé Brent. A piano cover of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” bounced through the air all around her and us. She told me later that she couldn’t even hear the music then. But the rest of us heard it, and we heard the I wish that every kiss was never-ending melody and quickly tugged on the tissues in our pockets that her mother had given to us beforehand. She and I, we used to send a GIF of Adam Sandler cry-singing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” in 50 First Dates back and forth to each other. But time passed and the song stopped being a funny acknowledgement of momentary grief. It turned into an emblem—a representation—of a good love. And now, it’s the final memory I have of Brian’s writing in the present tense.
But my life has always existed in paragraphs written in Beach Boys font. Before Jessi’s wedding, it was using Janelle Monáe’s “Dirty Computer” as a prompt in a summer poetry workshop. It was a Brian Wilson shirt from 2004 gifted to me by Hanif. It was Tom passing his Beach Boys picture book onto me on my first college birthday, or “Feel Flows” playing in the scene of Almost Famous that made me want to be a rock journalist, or buying a beat-up vinyl copy of Best of the Beach Boys Vol. 1 at a garage sale for a buck and building my entire collection around it, or recreating the “Don’t you think the Beach Boys are boss?” scene from American Graffiti with my dad. It was saving up to buy the Love & Mercy DVD at the mall, and it was singing a “Kokomo” duet with my mom in the car and then in the same room as the band. And before all of that, it was witnessing grown men cry all around me during a performance of “In My Room.”
And I don’t think I was ever properly introduced to the Beach Boys’ music. No, in a rare display of magic, the songs have always been there, always within me. Even when Brian, his brother Carl, cousin Mike Love, and friends Bruce Johnson and Al Jardine showed up to an episode of Full House playing on my parents’ television set, I already spoke the language of “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “I Get Around” and “California Girls.” Maybe it was radio osmosis that sent the Beach Boys to me—Youngstown’s 106.1 station played “Good Vibrations” a lot—but just as the words Coca-Cola, love, God, Elvis, hello, and OK transcend the English language, I hear Brian Wilson’s lyrics in my dreams. I will find the Beach Boys’ harmonies in every lifetime after this one.
Brian was the man who generated Pet Sounds—and at the age of 23, no less. It’s an accomplishment that 99.9% of human history will experience merely as tourists. But his favorite Turtles song was “Elenore” and his favorite movie was Norbit. His art was impossibly sophisticated and exhaustive, but his taste was vast in a reasonably human way. His obsession with “Shortenin’ Bread” was ludicrously niche yet charming. His talent was boundless, but there’s a recording of “Our Prayer” where you can hear him requesting a C# chord to guide his own singing—even the greatest ears can only muster a relative pitch.
Like Brian had in late 1964, the Beatles quit touring to focus on making records. There’s a certain sacrosanctum to what they came up with while studio-bound; listening to “A Day in the Life” is, for me, an academic choice more than a pleasurable one. I love the Beatles, and I love Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but not every godly creation can be related to by the common man. It’s impossible to overcome the distance between myself and the Beatles’ most intricate efforts. But those Beach Boys songs—those songs breathed the same air I do.
Even after Brian left the dense, peculiar sinfoniettas of “Surf’s Up” and “Here Today” in the dust and began filling sparse piano songs with tightly-held idioms like “Love & Mercy,” his music challenged its listeners to recognize what poetry lingers in the oft-overlooked crannies of life around them. There was optimism in a line like “if everybody had an ocean.” And, as frustrating as it may have been to endure Brian’s perfectionism 60 years ago—like the 26 takes needed to capture the electro-theremin in “Good Vibrations”—his unorthodox methods made the mundane more spectacular: a water jug or Coke can becomes a percussion instrument; the sounds of stirring animals or bites of crunchy vegetables are pitched like harmonies; fragments of congas, kazoos, jaw-harps, bouzoukis, tack pianos, temple blocks, and banjos combine to make sounds that simultaneously feel centuries old and brand new.
What Brian Wilson did has been intimated for decades. It’s why we have bands like Animal Collective, the Nines, R.E.M., the Flaming Lips, and Wilco. There’s an entire segment of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story that spoofs the distressed making of Smile, and Brian was, for so long, one of the few living geniuses whose genius was still being untangled by writers, thinkers, and listeners of all generations. His methods were fascinating. What compelled him to put bobby pins on piano strings, or to add tangents of a bicycle horn into the already lush operetta of “You Still Believe In Me”? The answer is not one of profundity, but of necessity: Those sounds lived in Brian’s head, and then they lived in the music.
And 30 years after the Beach Boys ripped off Chuck Berry and the Four Seasons, the next generations of artists began sampling them, winding up in songs by the likes of Wu-Tang Clan, the Avalanches, U2, Tatsuro Yamashita, and JPEGMAFIA. More now than ever before, the band’s cultural currency is recession-proof. Brian’s pop eccentricities, substantial and soothing both then and now, make up music history’s greatest paradox: There are no known words that absolutely capture the purpose of the Beach Boys’ music, and there are no known words that absolutely capture the singularity of Brian’s prodigious habits, but we, in our innate desire to make everything sing, have learned how to make our instruments sound beholden to his.
Brian Wilson crafted one of the most excellent and strange albums of all time and then soon abandoned an even better and stranger one. And I think, from a critical standpoint, it makes sense to laud that music in the way we all do and always will. In December 1966, Hit Parader predicted the Beach Boys would become “the greatest group in the world” upon the completion of Smile. Paul McCartney himself even knew that, logically, he and his three bandmates were not going to outclass the one-man brilliance behind “Good Vibrations.” The Beach Boys were stewards of God, all of them. They put their voices somewhere the rest of us could never reach. The beautiful part about it, I reckon, is that they returned to our land of mortals and shared it with the rest of us. Brian was music’s greatest exception—a genius, troubled man whose ear had a direct line to the otherworldly. The songs, like “God Only Knows” and “Caroline, No,” find you when you’re ready.
In a one-credit college course called “The History of Rock and Roll,” which I took just so I could dick around and listen to music I was already well-versed in, I gave my final presentation on Pet Sounds. Everyone else checked out CDs from the school’s library for theirs, but I made a special trip home to retrieve my LP copy, because our classroom had a record player. Sufjan Stevens told me that we tell stories to justify our existence. I think we also tell stories to better comprehend the unknown. I don’t know if any of my classmates cared about Pet Sounds, but it felt good to, if only for 20 minutes, feel like an expert on music that continues to fascinate me—music that I am still unthreading. I have enjoyed chasing the meaning of Brian Wilson’s music, and I look forward to following it from this life into the next.
Because Pet Sounds is a doorway—an invitation to step into a spiral draped in whimsy. Listening to it requires you to look for ghosts, and there is something dim and daunting waiting for you beyond it. Loving Pet Sounds as a teenager allowed me to find resemblance in Surf’s Up a decade later, in lyrics like I’m a cork on the ocean, floating over the raging sea and trees like me weren’t meant to live, if all this world can give is pollution and slow death. I needed those words then, as the gaps in my sorrow ached for nursery rhymes, spiritual awakenings, and coastal sentiments. My sadness deserved playful sequiturs, and Brian Wilson and his bandmates gave them to me.
But as I’ve gotten older, I continue turning more towards the postcard images and vocabulary that illustrated the Beach Boys’ pre-Pet Sounds California—the moments where Mike Love’s colorful visions of SoCal and Brian’s thoughtful confessions of sorrow made for perfect and potent anecdotes of the human condition. Likewise, I sit with The Beach Boys Today! more than any other album the band made. It’s the greatest pre-masterpiece record ever—Wrecking Crew-assisted magic built on 3-track recordings, vocal augments, and a waning reliance on Love’s lyrical hooks.
Pet Sounds was compelling for being a type of pop music candidly pilled with sketches of misery and meaninglessness. Today! was bluntly transparent, self-deprecating, and romantic—striking a balance between idealized love, lost innocence, and sentimentality. “Please Let Me Wonder” waxes poetic about being unlovable; “She Knows Me Too Well” reckons with relationship jealousy; “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” fears the obligations of masculinity and the sacrifices of aging. The Beach Boys weren’t singing about hot-rods and catching waves anymore; their lullabies had become decorative, delicate, and prematurely complex. And I have always liked that very much, this purgatory between consciousnesses—the margins separating adolescence and adulthood. I think Brian was at his best when he lived within those limits, and that’s why I think “Don’t Worry Baby” is the greatest piece of music ever written, in any genre or language.
Upon its arrival in May 1964, “Don’t Worry Baby” was a morose, B-side foil to its #1 hit A-side, the charged-up, joyous “I Get Around.” The former is about a car, but it’s also about the fundamental truths of love and shame. At a drag race, a boy brags about his car but soon fears he’ll either lose or crash. But his girlfriend quickly reassures him: “She told me, ‘Baby, when you race today, just take along my love with you. And if you knew how much I loved you, baby, nothing could go wrong with you.’” It’s an idea so simple and quick, a badge of humility culled from Brian’s bouts with stage fright and insecurity. But in “Don’t Worry Baby,” Brian gives us a conversation without every detail. In “Don’t Worry Baby,” the shadows let us fill in the gaps. In “Don’t Worry Baby,” the myths of California wane in the light of Brian’s vibrance. As I’ve mourned his death, this is where I recede into: a place where the summer is over and the summer has just begun.
On the day Brian passed, I was on a Zoom call with the National’s Matt Berninger. My phone lit up. Elise said, Brian Wilson. I knew what she meant. Those texts could never mean anything else. When you’re in an interview, that’s the only place you exist in. The life you left behind may still be going, and it may look very different once you re-enter it. But a crest of silence washed over me, as I sat with the news for a moment before saying anything. There’s a world we can all go and tell our secrets to, Brian argued. For him, that world was music. And how lucky we’ve all been to keep going with that knowledge, even as language mostly fails me when I’m in the company of a Beach Boys song. But I eventually found the courage to tell Matt, who came up with the right language for the both of us. “I took a piss next to him once,” he said. “He was at the urinal right next to me, and I was just so happy to be there. I didn’t say a word.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
