(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 8 August 2025 19:30, UK
I’m sure that in some sense, we’ve all dreamed about being Brian Wilson.
No, just me? Well, on a personal level, I’d love to have been blessed with the same ear for melody that the Beach Boys’ leader possessed, and to have been hailed as a genius when it came to songwriting, arrangement and production. Does this sound any more appealing to you yet?
Not only did he happen to have all of these numerous talents in his box of tricks, but he had a number of tangible achievements by which you could measure his brilliance, such as having written songs like ‘God Only Knows’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Surf’s Up’, and so on. It would be great to be able to claim to have written even one of those songs – heck, it would even be great to claim you’d written one of his lesser appreciated tracks like ‘Barbara Ann’. Put it simply, if you were offered the chance to swap brains and bodies with Wilson for even a day, from a musical standpoint, there are few others who would be more appealing to switch with.
There are, of course, downsides to being Wilson, not least his highly publicised struggles with mental illness, and there might be a point at which the inescapable urge to chase perfection might become tiresome to grapple with. Wilson may have been hailed as a genius on several occasions throughout his career, but that came with a lot of baggage which he constantly had to navigate with the utmost care.
Even so, up until his death, you’d imagine he retained an overwhelming sense of pride over the things he managed to achieve throughout his career, and there are likely very few regrets that he held within. Wilson even managed to finish Smile before he left this mortal coil, and while it may not have sounded as perfect and polished as the original sessions alongside the rest of The Beach Boys, it was the albatross around his neck that he’d been desperate to rid himself of, which he managed to do without losing any of his pride.
However, when Wilson was posed with the question of who he’d want to trade places with in the world of music, his answer was somewhat surprising, not because the person he wished to walk in the shoes of was of a lower calibre than he was, but because his peak of popularity came after Wilson. Normally, when asked this question, artists will switch places with someone they have always idolised, rather than choosing to swap with someone who was likely inspired by them.
When asked this question by Mojo in 2021, he pondered over his response before giving his praise to a 1970s pop icon. “That’s a hard question,” Wilson responded. “I’d have to put Elton John at the top of that list because of his voice, and he is great on piano. I admire him as a person, too.”
While Wilson selecting John is surprising in terms of how their careers had little overlap, their artistic approaches can definitely be construed as similar, and there are a number of qualities to John’s music that Wilson would almost certainly have seen as having mirrored his own methods. Without Pet Sounds, there would likely never have been a Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and it’s almost certain that Wilson would have admired the technicolour ambition that John showed on records such as this.
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