(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 31 March 2026 22:00, UK
For all of the great music Brian Wilson had in his head, he was never the best lyricist in the world.
His strong suit was in capturing the kind of emotions that no one realised they could feel when listening to music, and all that he needed was someone to bring the right words to the table whenever he talked about the more introspective parts of life. He didn’t want to be writing the same cars and surfing tunes for the rest of his life, and when you look at the other people who have fleshed out the band’s work, there was bound to be a lot more ground they could cover once the Summer of Love started.
Granted, there were always a lot more people Wilson had to answer to before putting out his records. ‘God Only Knows’ may have been one of the finest love songs that anyone had ever made during that time, but the fact that people got up in arms for him daring to use the word ‘God’ in one of the song titles is still one of the most unintentionally pieces of music history. The religious folks may have been made, but how could you hate on a song that was this pure and honest about love?
And then you had to deal with whatever Mike Love thought best suited The Beach Boys as well. While Love has been the main spirit of the band for the past few decades, the fact that he insisted on not moving too far outside of their comfort zone still makes him look like a bit of a goody two-shoes. And if you need proof, just listen to some of the outtakes from Pet Sounds where he can be heard making fun of some of the lyrics that Tony Asher had written for tunes like ‘I Know There’s An Answer’.
Sure, Asher might not have had music as his main profession when he was writing commercial jingles, but he was definitely the right person for the job when it came to laying down the lyrics of tunes like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’. But when looking at Asher’s lyrics compared to what Van Dyke Parks was doing, Parks wanted to move in a much more psychedelic direction than everyone else was ready for.
And while the work that the band did on Smile would spend a few decades on the shelf before being released, it’s not like Parks didn’t have a good head on his shoulders. Some of his best lines had a lot of captivating imagery in them, but when looking back on some of those sessions, Wilson remembered that it was a lot more difficult trying to find the right melodies to weave around those lyrics.
Parks was definitely a genius in his own right, but Wilson needed something a bit more sturdy if he wanted to get the right sound for his songs, saying, “Working with him is not easy at all because he is a perfectionist. He wants it his way and the right way. I’ve always liked what he’s come up with. Always. I’d never say, ‘That sucked,’ ’cause that would hurt his feelings.” That kind of diplomacy never stopped Love whenever he heard what Parks was doing with his lyrics.
As if he couldn’t be considered any more of a narc, Love was known to dissect a lot of Parks’s lyrics and even threw out a few of them when he felt that they were a little too drug-influenced. Then again, if you look at the rest of the world, avoiding sounding psychedelic in the late 1960s would have been like trying to have a disco hit without any drums; you could try, but don’t be surprised when it ends up sounding corny.
But even if Wilson had a hard time working with Parks every time he worked with his lyrics, it was never at the expense of having fun in the studio. For someone who was as gifted as he was, it’s sometimes better to be challenged every once in a while, and if the fruits of their labour were songs like ‘Surf’s Up’, maybe they should have collaborated a lot more often than they did back in the day.
