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November 4th, 2026 · 8:00pm GMT
‘God Only Knows’ is the pinnacle of The Beach Boys. The pièce de résistance. The peak they knew they’d never top. And it was all down to Brian Wilson.
Well, that’s at least the narrative you’ve been fooled into believing, anyway. There’s no denying that he was the linchpin of the band and acted as the axis on which its universe spun. But every time someone claims Brian was the only Beach Boy who mattered, they’re doing him an injustice.
Naturally, this state of affairs was never helped by his own brothers, most notably Dennis Wilson, who famously proclaimed: “Brian is The Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.” Yet Dennis only had to cast his mind back to their most famous song to find that this wasn’t necessarily true.
After all, despite writing the masterpiece, the same Brian Wilson who was supposedly “everything” was also the one to give up his lead vocal spot on ‘God Only Knows’, so his brother Carl Wilson could take the reins. He later explained this was because he was “looking for a tenderness and a sweetness which I knew Carl had in himself as well as in his voice,” although it’s unclear exactly what this insinuates about himself.
Getting there was a process as Brian came to realise that the shoe didn’t fit quite as comfortably on him as it did on his younger brother. As he later admitted, “I thought I was gonna do it. As the song progressed, I said, ‘Hey, I feel kind of natural doing this’. But when we completed creating the song, I said my brother Carl will probably be able to impart the message better than I could, so I sacrificed that one. But he had a good time singing it.”
“A good time” was certainly one way of putting it, as 300million records later, Carl’s voice is one of the most recognised in the pop music world, and the custodian of one of the greatest songs of all time. Yet how many of those plaudits have gone astray, aimed at Brian by listeners who assume it was him in the vocal booth?
Nothing can take away anything from what Brian achieved on ‘God Only Knows’, as well as Pet Sounds as a whole. There was a reason that, in life and in death, he was never described as anything less than a sonically immortal genius who changed the fabric of the musical landscape irrevocably.
Further reading: From The Vault
Yet despite his talents and ear for invention getting all the praise, one thing he is never duly credited for as much is knowing when to pass the torch. He very easily could have sung ‘God Only Knows’, and on one version, actually did. But it was telling that in the most renowned take, it was Carl who had a rare shot at being front and centre.
In some ways, you could brush it off as a case of Carl simply being the best man for the job. But the more you think about it, the more it looks like Brian’s attempt at a love letter and a thank-you to his family for coming along for the ride. The song strips love down to its barest and most honest form, but the reality was that, in terms of Brian and his brothers, God only knows what he’d have been without them.
