(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 18 April 2026 21:00, UK
There isn’t a single artist who has managed to put out as much perfect and questionable material as Brian Wilson has.
The Beach Boys should be commended for being a landmark group in rock and roll history, but while Wilson has made some of the greatest music of all time, he didn’t have a choice but to see his legacy get more than a little bit mutilated whenever he heard Mike Love steering them towards more commercial material on songs like ‘Kokomo’. But when looking through even their greatest hits, not everything that Wilson did was really up to the standards that he set for himself.
Then again, those standards are all dictated by what he accomplished with Pet Sounds. No one knew that Wilson had that kind of talent in him when he first started making songs about surfing and driving, but the fact that he could create a musical symphony was always going to make some of his greatest pop tunes look dull by comparison. ‘God Only Knows’ is a fantastic song, but it’s going to be a little awkward listening to it next to a song like ‘Surfin USA’ and ‘Little Deuce Coupe’.
But even if the label didn’t like it when Wilson made some of his more complex records, Summer Days and Summer Nights was the perfect middle ground for everything. The surf songs were there in rare form, but when looking through a song like ‘California Girls’, you can hear him beginning to experiment with how to structure a song, whether it’s weaving together different melodies or working out how the vocals should be overlapping on top of each other.
In fact, most of the record was already becoming a test-run for Pet Sounds in some respects, but ‘Let Him Run Wild’ was always a sore spot for Wilson. The song itself is among one of the band’s most underrated tunes, but considering how high Wilson sang on it, he felt so embarrassed by his performance that he felt like he didn’t need to hear the song ever again once he was finished mixing it.
The song is still great, but Wilson felt that he needed to redo that vocal if he wanted to be completely happy with it, saying, “I’m real self-conscious about the way I sang it. I sounded really lame. That’s one of the least favourite things that I ever did. My voice sounds like a little girl. The track was beautiful. Great music, but the vocal is so lame. I don’t like it at all. Any time someone plays that record when I’m around, I walk out of the room.”
Granted, it’s not like most fans weren’t used to hearing him sing that high. I mean, ‘I Get Around’ is one of the most challenging songs for anyone to match because of how high Wilson is singing, but since the whole song is about trying to woo a girlfriend by watching her boyfriend run around behind her back, he’s not putting up the greatest image of some suave singer that’s going to win her affection.
But, really, is this one of the most regrettable vocals that Wilson has ever been involved with? Hell no. If anything, most of the Love-focused albums in the late 1980s are a lot worse than anything Wilson ever did, but even when you look at what the band’s resident genius did on his own, it’s not like ‘Smart Girls’ was ever going to be considered one of the best songs that he ever wrote, especially with the token rap verse thrown in to make him look hip with the kids back in the day.
If Wilson found this song to be lame, it’s completely understandable, but you need these kinds of growing pains before getting to an album like Pet Sounds. There was definitely a learning curve to him making some of the best rock and roll ever produced, and sometimes that means going through certain tunes to see what works and what doesn’t whenever you’re in front of the microphone.
