It was in the middle of an otherwise-lovely Wednesday afternoon that I found out June 11, 2025 would go down as one of the saddest days for pop music. Brian Wilson, leader of The Beach Boys and one of the greatest masterminds in all of pop music history, has left us at age 82.
It’s so impossible to overstate Brian’s influence that I don’t even know where to begin. Only The Beatles–his greatest creative rivals–can claim to have further innovated the pop music form, and Brian alone took on the singing, songwriting, and production roles that multiple Beatles and their producer George Martin did as a unit. Brian saw that pop music could be more than something you sing and dance to, that it could be a vessel for emotional vulnerability and a spiritual journey. He was one of the earliest musicians to see that pop could accomplish something more as an album-oriented art form than as just a singles-oriented one. He was one of the earliest musicians to use the studio as an instrument. He came up with chord changes and orchestral arrangements that were unheard of in pop until he did it. He crafted some of the most angelic vocal harmonies in the history of recorded music. He helped revolutionize surf music and rock & roll. He helped invent psychedelic pop, art pop, progressive pop, and even lo-fi bedroom pop. He was so often one step ahead of all of his major contemporaries in the mid 1960s–as even Paul McCartney has said on multiple occasions–and an influence on so many of them. Later on, his influence extended into punk, alternative rock, indie rock, and other forms of underground music, as well as multiple generations of other forward-thinking pop stars and rock stars. Radiohead, Ramones, R.E.M., Weezer, Animal Collective, My Bloody Valentine, Janelle Monáe, Lana Del Rey, Frank Ocean, The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Tame Impala, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, and Kacey Musgraves are just a few of the artists who have directly channelled his influence in their own music. You could probably fill a book with the list of others that he impacted in some way.
I don’t think Brian’s death is the time for a history lesson–but if you want one, my list of Beach Boys albums, ranked and my brief history of The Beach Boys’ rivalry with The Beatles have a lot of history baked into them–so here’s something a little more personal. For so many of us–myself included–the music of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys is a lifelong love affair, one that starts at a young age and still finds ways to surprise you decades later. The first time I heard The Beach Boys, I was no older than six or seven; I know this because in first grade, I was tasked with illustrating a picture book and mine included a scene in which my childhood best friend and I danced in my room to my Beach Boys vs Jan & Dean CD, a split compilation of The Beach Boys’ early surf-pop songs and the very musically-similar Jan & Dean, many of whom’s songs were also written or co-written by Brian Wilson. All I knew at the time was that the songs were fun (fun, fun) and catchy and that the energy was undeniable. I couldn’t put it into these words back then, but the rich, beautiful intricacy of their vocal harmonies–even on their earliest songs–was pure magic.
My next Beach Boys CD would be Endless Summer, the classic 1974 compilation made up only of pre-Pet Sounds material that (fortunately) brought The Beach Boys back into the public eye after a commercial rough patch but (unfortunately) positioned them as a nostalgia act and shifted the focus away from their most innovative material. Fortunately for me, I had the CD release, which tacked on their #1 hit single “Good Vibrations.” From a distance, it’s easy to see why that song and its deceptively simple chorus fits in perfectly with the girls-cars-and-surfing-obsessed early Beach Boys material, and it’s also easy to see why Capitol would utilize the extra CD space to add in a #1 single. And as a young kid, I didn’t have the context or the ear to differentiate much between a song like “Good Vibrations” and a song like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Fast forward to my teenage years, “Good Vibrations” caught me off guard one afternoon by coming on the radio. And this time, it didn’t sound like the simple, juvenile, surfy pop rock that I remembered. I heard it as what Brian intended it to be: the lead single from his teenage symphony to God.
It’s fascinating to watch all the documentaries and read all the books you can about the obsessive studio wizard Brian became for Pet Sounds, followup single “Good Vibrations,” and intended followup album Smile, and that is something I highly recommend doing if you haven’t already. It’s a thrill to live vicariously through classic anecdotes like Brian telling his studio musicians to make the percussion “sound like jewelry,” or Brian putting his piano in a sandbox so he could write with his feet in the sand, or the song “Good Vibrations” alone taking seven months to record and resulting in over 90 hours of tape, but even if you don’t know or care about the process, the music speaks for itself. When you look at the sheet music for “God Only Knows,” you’re presented with complex chord progressions that don’t look anything like pop music on paper. When you hear the song, you’re not alone if you’re brought to tears on even your hundredth listen.
Pet Sounds needs no introduction as one of the greatest pop albums of all time, if not the greatest. Despite so many hurdles for Brian to overcome–pushback on the new direction from bandmate Mike Love, interference from Brian’s father/former manager Murry Wilson, pressure from Capitol to include a hit single, and Brian’s own personal demons–everything went right with Pet Sounds. Inspired by The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, it was one of the first album-oriented pop albums in history, and it in turn quickly inspired The Beatles to make the similarly colorful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The harmonies are even more blissful than on The Beach Boys’ earlier material, the arrangements (recorded with Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew) wrap around you like a warm summer breeze, and the emotional content (penned by Brian with co-lyricist Tony Asher) is raw, personal, and vulnerable in a way that rock and pop music in the mid 1960s never really was until this album came out. I don’t personally love this designation but there’s a reason people call it “the first emo album.” It possesses a wide-eyed, childlike whimsy that other musicians have been tapping into for going on 60 years.
After devouring Pet Sounds, I–like many other Beach Boys fans I’ve talked to over the years–then did two things. I went back to those early Beach Boys songs and heard them in a new light, heard how the seeds for Pet Sounds were being sewn on so many of them, whether it was the intimacy of “In My Room” and side B of Today!, the complex layering of “I Get Around” and “California Girls,” or the way Brian discovered his own magical falsetto on “Surfer Girl.” And then I found out that Brian intended to release an album that would be as much of an improvement from Pet Sounds as that album was from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), Smile. To sum up the story of Smile in one sentence, “Good Vibrations” was released as its chart-topping lead single, but then the internal and external pressures that surrounded Brian during the making of Pet Sounds came to a head and Smile was abandoned after being ninety-plus perfect finished. After scrapping the album, Brian left the top-tier studios that he recorded Pet Sounds and Smile in, built a home studio, and tacked the “Good Vibrations” single onto an album mostly made of scrappily home-recorded Smile material called Smiley Smile. It’s one of the biggest shames in pop music history that Smile wasn’t released in 1967 like it should have been, but everything happens for a reason, and Smiley Smile is nearly as groundbreaking. The entire lo-fi / bedroom pop genre as we know it was born on that album.
Like so many Beach Boys fans, the more I learned about Smile, the more I needed to hear it, and at the time, it technically didn’t exist. Songs from the Smile sessions trickled out across some of the underrated, commercially-unsuccessful Beach Boys albums that followed, and bootlegs appeared over the years too. With hours and hours of tape and so many different takes of all of the album’s songs, Beach Boys fanatics tried to compile their own versions of what they believed Brian wanted Smile to be, and–like Deadheads would do with live Grateful Dead shows–they’d trade tapes to share versions of Smile with the world. A key development came in 2004, when Brian re-recorded Smile with a new backing band for the album Brian Wilson Presents Smile and performed it across a series of concerts at London’s Royal Festival Hall–with Paul McCartney and George Martin in attendance–followed by an LA concert that was immortalized as a concert film. Seven years after that, the Brian Wilson Presents Smile tracklisting was used as a guide when Brian and other producers/archivists painstakingly went back through the Smile tapes and released 2011’s The Smile Sessions, turning the most storied “lost” album of all time into something that no longer just existed in Beach Boys fans’ imaginations. This was as close to the real Smile as we were ever going to get, and it was glorious. Just like Brian promised, it was as much an improvement from Pet Sounds as that album was from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). It’s a teenage symphony to God. It’s pop music in its most elevated form. It’s also (thanks in part to Brian’s core collaborator Van Dyke Parks) American music in its most elevated form. It’s better than Sgt. Pepper’s, and it leaves me wondering how The Beatles might’ve tried to top it if it came out in 1967. It’s my favorite album of all time.
Smile wasn’t the end of the road for Brian, though his life and career were never the same in its aftermath. He became less involved with the band as his mental health issues ramped up in the years that followed, and he also contributed some of his best songs to the lesser-known Beach Boys albums that were released in between Pet Sounds and Endless Summer. (The best of them: “‘Til I Die” from 1971’s Surf’s Up, whose title track also happens to be one of the best Smile tracks. The most essential version of the latter: the haunting, solo-piano-and-vocal version that Brian performed on television on December 15, 1966. But I digress.) In 1977, he helped invent psychedelic synthpop with The Beach Boys Love You.
As Brian’s mental health and his controversial psychologist Eugene Landy plagued him into the 1980s, Brian continued to be presented as a tragic figure, and it only made us all root for him even more. Brian became more than a musician; he became an underdog story, someone you could rally behind for the rest of your life because no matter how many times he was called a “genius,” it still felt like he wasn’t fully getting his due. Brian resonates so much with indie/alternative/underground musicians because, no matter how famous The Beach Boys are, being a Brian Wilson fan means you’re in on one of the most profound secrets in all of pop music history. All you have to do is namedrop “Brian Wilson” or “Pet Sounds” and we know it’s shorthand for “boundary-breaking pop music.” His name is synonymous with innovation, with love, with whimsy, with genius, and with the notion that there’s always something greater to strive for than whatever’s spoonfed to us or expected of us.
Thank you, Brian Wilson. God only knows what we’d be without you.