(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 15 January 2026 14:40, UK
The music of Brian Wilson has been making people’s hearts dance for decades. But dancing was usually far from what he really wanted to achieve when it came to music. For him, making pop songs was fine and dandy, but creating sonic perfection was his real drive.
Although he may not have been looking to make the most timeless music ever made when he started, Wilson’s creative genius drove him to create the most musically expansive pieces that he could, culminating in miniature teenage symphonies on tracks like ‘Good Vibrations’ or ‘Surf’s Up’. Although Wilson may have his classics under his belt, he admits that one album lit a fire in him from the moment he heard it.
When crafting his masterpieces, though, Wilson already had a broad musical palette. Combing through his favourite records, Wilson was always indebted to the work of The Four Freshmen, taking their brilliant blend of vocal harmonies and applying them to songs about surfing on the coast of California.
Even though The Beach Boys had a winning formula that worked for Wilson, he never stopped being a music fan. As he was tearing up the charts with songs like ‘Surfin USA’, Wilson was also enamoured with songs like ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronettes, featuring the now-famous Wall of Sound and Ronnie Spector’s amazing vocals over the top.
While Wilson may have thought of taking his music further, it wasn’t until hearing The Beatles’ album Rubber Soul that he had a target in mind. Looking to make an album that could be an artistic equal to the Fab Four’s masterpiece, Wilson would come off the road to finetune the songs on Pet Sounds, creating some of the most musically sophisticated songs the pop world had ever seen.
All of The Beach Boys. (Credits: Far Out / Public Domain)
However, Wilson also had a firm love of classical pieces outside of pop and rock music. Going through his back catalogue, Wilson would single out Wendy Carlos’s take on Bach’s most significant work as one of the most electrifying albums he had ever heard. While Carlos was known as a composer who primarily indulged in electronic music, his taste for the baroque period of classical music was wildly inventive, featuring space-age sounding takes on pieces like ‘Air on a G String’.
While many rock artists may have pulled from classical music around this time, Wilson thought this was a brilliant synthesis of past and present musical styles, saying in his biography, “Switched-On Bach, the [Wendy] Carlos record, was one of the most electrifying albums I ever heard. When I first heard it, right around the time we were finishing Friends, it turned me on so much that I can’t even explain it. It was so intricate and so clear at the same time”.
The truth is, this kind of recommendation from the mind of Wilson should be expected. Across a range of impeccable Beach Boys albums, Wilson proved he was about as pristine an example of perfect arrangement as one might be able to find in the annals of pop history.
Although Wilson had already had a healthy dose of classical harmony sprinkled throughout Pet Sounds, Carlos was just getting started with his new approach to sound. Aside from his take on Bach’s masterpieces, her interpretation of various foreboding sounds would also revolutionise the cinematic experience, coming up with the piercing scores for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange.
Regardless of the horror-themed scores that would come later, Wilson would always focus on the musical side of the record, going on to dream even bigger when working on his later work, like Surf’s Up. For all of the great music that Wilson has given us, it’s nice to know that even he can find inspiration out in the wild.
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