Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s 12 Essential Songs
Posted on: Jun 11, 2025 22:56 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
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The Beach Boys leader, who died on wed, was a superb author, transcriber and producer whose ambitions propelled his band — and contemporaries like the Beatles — into the future.
The gimmick of the Beach Boys was to package the 1960s California dream in pop singles that wed up-tempo guitar songs with multipart harmonies. The reason the group endured was Brian Wilson, the group’s resident genius, who died on Wednesday at 82. Wilson wrote, arranged and produced most of its catalog. (He also sang and played bass.) As he exhausted the possibilities of the group’s original approach, his music grew more ambitious.
Although his sonic experiments frustrated some of the Beach Boys’ fans (and other members of the group), it also resulted in an uncommon body of work, documentation of Wilson’s lifelong quest for musical beauty and grace. Even when Wilson spent years caught in the riptide of drug abuse and his own psychological struggles, his music was his life preserver — it provided solace for both him and his listeners.
Hear 12 of his greatest tracks. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)
Wilson borrowed the music of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” like it was a buddy’s T-Bird and took it for a joyride, with new lyrics about surfboard wax, huarache sandals and the ecstatic mood of a teenage crowd. What made the single irresistible: the Beach Boys’ five-part harmonies on the chorus, which felt like California sunshine to anyone within earshot of a transistor radio.
Becoming the Beach Boys’ full-time producer and creative force, Wilson wrote one paean after another to the pleasures of being a teenager in California, but his music was also suffused with melancholy: “In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears,” he sang of his own bedroom. He deployed his falsetto for the first time in these sessions, accentuating his emotional frailty.
As Wilson told the tale, the inspiration for “California Girls” came from his first acid trip: After spending some time marinating in self-doubt with a pillow over his head, he went to the piano and played “bum-buhdeeda” cowboy music for an hour. That loping rhythm became the bedrock of one of the Beach Boys’ defining hits. The lyrics, by Wilson and his bandmate Mike Love, elided the song’s psychedelic origin in favor of clean-cut California hedonism.
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