1.) I’ve been wanting to write a bit about Brian Wilson and his music before too much time elapses after his passing on June 11, 2025. I know I don’t have anything new or particularly original to add to the ongoing conversation about him. It just feels like the right moment to reflect a bit on his life and his music, or maybe to track the ways and places where his music has been meaningful in my life.
2.) The first memory that always comes to mind when I think about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys is from my early years of living in Chicago, circa late 2002/early 2003. Riding the red line north to the Rogers Park neighborhood on my way to hang out with dear friends after work, I spent a lot of time listening to Pet Sounds on my portable CD player. (This was before iPods!) These were also my early years of working in the publishing industry, and I was fortunate enough at the time to be doing some light production and editing work on the first edition of Charles Granata’s book Wouldn’t It Be Nice. (Hence my deep dive on Pet Sounds specifically.)
It’s actually hard to capture the ineffable quality of the memory—it’s such an interior, felt experience that’s tied most powerfully to the kinesthetic sense of the train’s movement. I think there was probably even some part of me at the time that was cognizant of the romance of the moment, what with being able to see my own face faintly reflected in the window, drinking in the pleasure of my own momentary solitude, that urban experience of being alone and anonymous in the midst of a crowded place, while simultaneously meditating on the music, trying to get inside what made those songs so classic. For whatever reason “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” is the one that always comes to mind when I think of those train rides—something about that seemingly ever-ascending chord progression and the swooningly luscious strings.
Now that I think of it, that was when my true adult appreciation for the Beach Boys really started. Of course I’d known their music for essentially my whole life (more on which below). But this was the first time I’d consciously explored a full album of theirs at length. And listening while in motion (whether in a vehicle or out walking) has always been my surest way of connecting most deeply and intentionally with a piece of music that I’m eager to get inside of.
In the few years immediately prior to those train rides, I’d started to get into Scott Walker’s late ’60s solo stuff, and I think, in some ways, learning to love the elaborate string arrangements and sophisticated structures of those songs helped prime me for what Brian Wilson was doing with the Wrecking Crew here. As a recovering musical theater nerd in my early 20s, there was a part of me that was constantly on guard for music that trafficked too easily in cheese and schmaltz; I always joke that there was a part of me that thought, Wait–I’m allowed to like this? when I first heard the huge orchestrations on Walker’s “Big Louise” and “Through a Long and Sleepless Night.” And while the Pet Sounds arrangements are of course more rock-based and thus a bit less overtly dramatic, there is a shared seriousness there, a commitment to music as a direct and revolutionary way to communicate the ineffable. Which can be embarrassing! Sincerity can be humiliating! But as anyone who’s ever quietly sobbed over a movie on an airplane can attest, often the intimacy of engaging with a piece of art through the intense focus that headphones provides can allow the work to bypass our more critical tendencies and go straight to our hearts. And that’s surely what those long train rides spent inside the dream of that batch of songs did for me.
I also have to note that, regardless of the fact that I was actually professionally involved with its production, Wouldn’t It Be Nice remains one of the best books about music I’ve ever read. It truly gets to the heart of what went into the creation of the album, beyond mere gossip or trivia. It’s brimming with really intricate music-nerd stuff, and it’s glorious. I recommend it in its more recent second edition unreservedly.1
3.) Speaking of “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” holy shit, have you heard this clip of Wilson doing his own overdubs for an ultimately unused take of the song?
Somebody posted it on Instagram a couple years ago, and I responded to it as if I were watching an action movie or a high-stakes basketball game–it’s that thrilling to hear each new layer of harmony emerge as the clip goes on.
4.) I never dreamed that I would ever get to see any iteration of the Beach Boys play live. Yet my partner Brian and I were fortunate enough to see Brian Wilson with Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin (backed by members of the Wondermints) on their Christmas tour in late 2018.
I’ve written a bunch before about how I like to go to concerts and turn on my clairvoyance so that I can psychically take a look at what chakra each musician is predominantly playing from. But that night I barely needed to tune in to that sixth sense to get the overwhelming impression that the place inside Brian Wilson responsible for his music went beyond a singular chakra, went beyond the prosaic qualities of what I’d become accustomed to seeing in someone’s energy body at all. What I saw in there was, uh, not human.
I know it sounds beyond corny to say, and I know that it sounds unduly influenced by my deep love of and respect for his music (not to mention the knowledge of the mental and emotional troubles that he’d experienced throughout his life). But, in my own defense, I did learn to turn on my clairvoyance with as much neutrality as possible. And I have to promise you that what I saw was, for lack of a better word, angelic.
5.) A day or two after the announcement of Wilson’s passing, my husband turned on a generic Apple Music Beach Boys mix in our living room, just so we could sit with his actual legacy—those songs!—beyond the chatter of social media and news commentary about him. “Good Vibrations” was the first song that came up, and the playlist spun through lots of the other big, obvious hits. We were mostly listening in silence, though we would occasionally exclaim over some cool hook or other unique element in any given song, marveling anew at these tunes we’ve both heard scores of times over the course of our lives. And when “I Get Around” came up, I declared, after about a minute, “If you ever physically cut my body open, you would find this song playing inside my bones.” Though it’s not a song I listen to particularly often these days, it’s so elemental to me, to my sense of myself and my sense of how music is interwoven into my life.
The single was in the little box of 45s that my dad had assembled for me to listen to on the mini-record player in my toy room when I was very, very young. I was so young that I actually don’t have any specific, conscious memories of listening to it, though I know I must have heard it countless times. And, to be completely honest, I’m sure my love and affection for it is also heightened by my love and affection for The Muppet Show sketch that used it too.
But when I think of it, it’s actually kind of a genius song to introduce to a little kid. It’s of course infernally catchy and so boppy that it basically requires jumping and dancing. There are so many weird little vocal hooks in oddball registers–from the super high to the super low–that feel borderline cartoony and, as such, irresistible to sing along with. (“Wah-wah-oooooh!”) And then there’s the tension-and-release pattern that swings from the driving boogie of the choruses featuring Brian’s soaring falsetto to the spacious, percussive, almost avant-garde weirdness of Mike Love’s verses. (Handclaps always work a treat.) It’s its own little immaculately wrought puzzle box of sonic delights that can also (should also?) be enjoyed on a purely instinctive, physical level. All in just over two minutes! How could I not be permanently transfixed by it?
6.) So what does this all mean? What does it all add up to? I love Brian Wilson’s music just as much as countless others do and countless others have, spanning decades. My experience of loving his music isn’t particularly expansive; I can’t cite obscurities and specifics about the albums, and I don’t have that many other significant personal memories to highlight. (Though I suppose I should note here that my husband and I did play “Sail On, Sailor” at the conclusion of our very short, very private backyard wedding in the summer of 2020.)
If I were a different kind of writer and thinker, I suppose I could launch into some extended meditation at this point about how Wilson’s music is among a dying breed of shared monocultural reference points that exist less and less any more. I could even borrow the sentiment from the classic, gut-punch conclusion of Lester Bangs’s essay “Where Were You When Elvis Died?”: “But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on [Brian Wilson]. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”
But I think the absolute purity of Wilson’s musical output is a gentle reminder in itself that the depth of my own private, personal feelings about it is actually the whole point. The songs’ inarguably direct impact on any given listener entirely supersedes whatever increasingly rote observation of what a genius he was or how troubled he was you could possibly make anymore. Music that good, and that widely known, is allowed to just be good. It can really just be its own perfect referent. Any discussion of its component parts should always, ultimately, and only lead you back to the music itself.
7.) Thank you, Mr. Wilson. May you be at peace.
- Turns out I’ve actually written about this memory before! I totally forgot that, on the occasion of the release of the second edition of the book in 2016, the marketing team at the publisher I used to work for asked me to write a short piece about my experience working on the first edition. I happily said yes. The piece is technically still online here, although it’s difficult to find without that direct link (the blog appears to be otherwise inactive and unlisted on the site) and it’s also missing the chunk of text that I quoted from the book itself. So for the sake of posterity, I’ll post it in full here:
“Not long after I first started working as the editorial assistant for Chicago Review Press back in 2002, I was tasked with reviewing corrections for the first edition of Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Charles Granata’s masterful book about the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds. It was fairly basic editorial procedure, mostly just making sure that the proofreader’s changes had been accurately entered by the typesetter, but still, I couldn’t believe my luck. Here I was, a recent college graduate, living in the big city, putting my English major to good use, getting paid to work on a book about one of the greatest albums of all time. How had this suddenly become my life?!
“In those days before I could afford an iPod, I’d carry a portable CD player and a small batch of CDs with me on my travels around the city. The books from CRP’s A Cappella imprint that I happened to be working on at any given time naturally inspired my choice of soundtrack so, of course, Pet Sounds immediately went into heavy rotation. In those aimless days of being still relatively new to Chicago, I remember riding around on the red line, looking out the windows at the neighborhoods slipping by, listening to the album on my headphones, getting lost in the intricate vocal harmonies and the endless depth of Brian Wilson’s arrangements. I think back on that time in my life with a lot of fondness. And since my work on the book is a big part of those memories, I was thrilled when I learned earlier this year that Granata wanted to put out a revised second edition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the album.
“I’m also a musician in my spare time, and I grew up listening to my father, also a musician, talking shop with his friends about their gigs, their gear, and other tricks of the trade. Even when, as a child, many of the more technical terms and other lingo were completely foreign to me, there was something about the rhythm of that kind of specific, professional intimacy that lit me up inside like a Christmas tree. Secret knowledge is always kind of inherently thrilling knowledge to me. Though reviews of and writing about music by non-musicians can certainly be intellectually rigorous and enlightening in their own ways, there’s just nothing like hearing true pros discussing the ins and outs of their own discipline. And that’s what makes Wouldn’t It Be Nice such an exceptional book.
“Granata of course approaches Pet Sounds as a fan—it’s borderline impossible to know the album and not to love it, not to want to gush about it. But he, crucially, manages to pivot away from effusive descriptions of how much the album meant to him as a young man in order to approach it like the historian and record producer that he also is. This redirection enabled him to get his all-star cast of interviewees to dish the dirt on their memories of the recording sessions in that delicious spirit of casually dispensed insider knowledge. Members of the Wrecking Crew, lyricist Tony Asher, and many of the Beach Boys themselves are all duly represented. One of my favorite passages comes early in the book, in a discussion of why the group’s vocal harmonies are so incredibly rich and resonant:
Like the Beach Boys, the Four Freshmen were a family group comprised of four members. The quartet was well schooled; their harmonizing was based on solid music theory—and eight good ears. “We realized that there was more to singing harmony than just what the piano played,” says founding member Ross Barbour. “You can’t get beautiful overtones if you sing the notes a piano plays; you’ve got to tweak the vocal notes, making them a bit sharp or flat in certain places. Then you must go for those ‘color’ chords with a distinctive coloration in them, like major sevenths and flatted ninths. Some of those ‘far out’ chords can make such pretty sounds when you sing them. It can make your hair stand up when a chord rings. We sang those chords because they harmonized and made overtones in our ears.”
The ringing chords and splendid overtones were the keys to the Four Freshmen’s pleasing vocal harmony. “The ringing of the chords is what Brian Wilson fell in love with—he was charmed by this sound,” Barbour explains. “On ‘Now You Know,’ we created a chordal tension where the notes and chords are pulled together tightly like a chain, in which the harmonies ring on each other.”
Although the best performers make it seem simple, there’s a good measure of technical logic behind fine vocal harmony. “Good vocals are much more in tune than the keyboard,” explains barbershop vocal arranger David Wright. “The keyboard is out of tune by virtue of Bach’s tempered scale; it allows for modulation, but it doesn’t really present any given key in tune. A good vocal ensemble finds that finer tuning. Even though they may have instruments in the background, the three or four voices that are finding each other find those correct mathematical relationships. Therefore, you get a kind of stability that we call ‘ring and lock.’ When the Beach Boys hit a good major chord it locked, and sounded just beautiful.”
The ringing of a chord is also known as “expanded sound.” “In the vocal world, when we talk about expanded sound, it means that even though there are four voices, it sounds like more than four voices,” Wright explains. “This happens because the voices are tuned well, and they’re matched in terms of their timbre and the word sounds. It gives the impression of more voices than are actually there, because they’re supporting each other’s harmonics. The reinforced overtones give the harmony a bigger sound than what you’d expect out of so few voices.”
Heredity is another important factor. “There haven’t been many great vocal groups that didn’t have some family in them,” Barbour asserts. “The vocal sound is similar by heredity and the pronunciation is the same, because the members grew up in the same environment. Pronunciation is key; if you’re not all pronouncing the words the same, it sounds wrong when you sing it. Also, when you’re young, you learn how to get along with your brother or your sister, and when you build a vocal group, your biggest challenge is to stay together and get along. It appears that the Wilson brothers learned how to solve family problems through singing.”
“And that’s just pages 19–21 of the book! That’s not even getting into the writing and recording of the album itself yet!
“Suffice to say, I adore this book. Granata’s attention to detail combined with his clear affection for the music and ability to translate it all into lucid, readable prose is a major gift to any Beach Boys fan or aspiring music writer. Check it out, learn from the best, and then let it lead you back to Pet Sounds with renewed love and admiration.” ↩︎
Queen of Peaches 