Credit: Far Out / Steve Proctor
Sat 1 August 2026 18:30, UK
Lindsey Buckingham always had a certain rhythm to the way that he wrote his music.
Whereas everyone in Fleetwood Mac was used to making the kind of records that any pop fan could enjoy, half the reason why Buckingham’s songs worked was because of the meticulous craftsmanship he put into every single note that ended up on one of his records. A lot of his bandmates would have probably called him a fanatic around that time, but much of that came from him studying some of the greatest song crafters in American music to get to where he wanted to go.
And that’s not just limited to rock and roll, either. His fingerpicking style is what separated him from every other rock guitarist out at the time, and there were more than a few times when he seemed to be determined to never play with a pick for as long as he lived. His approach needed to be more hands-on, but when it came to the studio, he had a much different outlook than just picking his way through songs.
Some of the greatest tunes that he ever made sounded like they could have been Phil Spector productions, but that didn’t mean all of them came easily. Buckingham could be cutthroat with any band member when it came to getting the sounds in his head, and he wasn’t above telling John McVie how his bass part should move or even getting physical with an engineer for accidentally wiping out something that he recorded.
In fact, that’s not that far off from the cutthroat nature of the industry years before, but Brian Wilson operated in a completely different way. He didn’t like the idea of making every member of the band suffer to get what they wanted, and if he was going to make something that sounded great for The Beach Boys, he was going to make sure that he captured the sound of them having fun every time they performed.
Pet Sounds did have a few more sophisticated songs than their early years, but Buckingham was already on board from the days of ‘Surfer Girl’ and ‘In My Room’. Each one of them was paving the way towards something bigger, and The Beach Boys Today was the moment that Buckingham realised that people needed to be paying extra attention to where Wilson would be going in the next few years.
The back half of the record was full of mature B-sides, and Buckingham figured that Wilson’s potential was about to explode, saying, “Before [Pet Sounds] there’s Side Two of The Beach Boys Today!, which is really just one ballad after another and is for me one of the great sides on a rock album.
Further reading: From The Vault
“Those are beautiful numbers — ‘Please Let Me Wonder,’ ‘Kiss Me Baby,’ ‘She Knows Me Too Well,’ ‘In the Back of My Mind’ — that foreshadow Brian’s angst and start exposing his vulnerability. A lot of what you find later on Pet Sounds or Smile, you could find in a different form early on.”
Out of all those songs, though, ‘Please Let Me Wonder’ is definitely the one that jumps out as the most interesting. No one would have been used to opening themselves up as much as Wilson did on the record, and that subtle moment in the studio where he says ‘I love you’ to his wife on the microphone is one of the more heartfelt moments to come out of their career.
The band is still going to be known as a caricature for what fun in the summertime was supposed to sound like, but it’s people like Buckingham that have carried on the real lessons that Wilson had to teach. There was so much to explore once you learn more than those three chords, and with the right idea for a song, there was no limit to where you could go once you reached the studio.
