(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 19 March 2026 0:00, UK
There hasn’t been a single person who has exemplified the utopian side of America quite like Brian Wilson has.
The Beach Boys are already known for their fun in the sun songs, but when you look at the vast catalogue that Wilson built up over his career, you can see him slowly peeling back the layers of harmony and finding the kind of music that no one else could have possibly landed on when he started making Pet Sounds. This was the American answer to acts like The Beatles, but Wilson had songs that could cut a lot deeper than his British friends when it came to the real issues facing the world.
Then again, The Beach Boys being a political band isn’t really something that anyone needed to hear. The idea of message songs in the early 1960s was bound to be a little bit trite or outright embarrassing in a few spots, and when looking through what Wilson has made on his own, it’s not a shock that he often needs another lyricist sitting by his side to help him articulate what he’s trying to say all the time.
Van Dyke Parks and Tony Asher wrote some fantastic lyrics for the group, but Wilson’s more juvenile songs can be extremely hit or miss, depending on which songs you’re looking at. ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ is among the greatest songs that Wilson has ever made, but at the same time, this is the man who also wrote songs that are overtly creepy, like ‘Roller Skating Child’, so it’s hard to really gauge what kind of songs worked best for his style of writing.
Which brings us to the one person that everyone loves to hate: Mike Love. And not for good reason, either. Love has positioned himself as one of the biggest assholes in the story of the band, and while that list also includes everyone from the band’s abusive father to Charles Manson, it’s still hard to shake the bullish authority that Love wanted to have over everything that the band made.
That said, it’s not like he didn’t have a few good instincts when it came to writing lyrics. If we’re going to give him his flowers a little bit, ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘California Girls’ wouldn’t have been hits without his voice, and even if ‘Kokomo’ is a steaming hot blast of 1980s sheen, you can’t deny that the hook gets stuck in everyone’s head for a reason. And when America was rocked by the assassination of John F Kennedy, Love and Brian managed to capture everything perfectly on the song ‘The Warmth of the Sun’.
From the minute that they heard about the president’s death, Wilson said that they only needed a few minutes to get their thoughts down, saying, “We heard about Kennedy’s death and Mike Love goes, ‘Do you want to write a song on his behalf?’ and I go ‘Sure.’ It was about six in the afternoon, and I went to our production office where there was a little piano. It took us 45 minutes, it came so fast. That’s how fast we worked. Some of the best songs come like that. They are the most divinely inspired.”
And compared to the other political tunes from around that time, there’s a reason why Wilson’s tune holds up a lot better than, say, The Byrds’s ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’. With no disrespect meant to Roger McGuinn, there’s a certain melancholy in between the soaring harmonies on this song that was bound to resonate with people that were facing an uncertain future as America dealt with the loss of one of their leaders.
If you wanted to be mean-spirited, you could claim that the band tried to cash in on the moment and make it about themselves by not mentioning Kennedy in the title, but that’s really missing the point. The nation was in mourning, and even if Kennedy wasn’t with us for very long, he was still a symbol of what America could have been if they banded together.
