(Credits: Far Out / Brian Wilson)
Mon 20 April 2026 2:00, UK
“I may not always love you, but as long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it,” Brian Wilson wrote, mystically and whimsically, on the 1966 masterpiece ‘God Only Knows’. Here are some of his best-ever lyrics, written in collaboration with Tony Asher, cementing beyond the seminal Beach Boys sound that he had fire in his belly and something unique to say.
It’s no surprise, then, that the only song Wilson “didn’t like at all” in the Beach Boys repertoire consisted of mysterious lyrics that had seemed to appear insidiously out of thin air. “Caught like a sewer rat alone, but I sail, bought like a crust of bread, but oh, do I wail?” Blondie Chaplin sings with a sticky apprehension on the 1973 track, ‘Sail On, Sailor’.
Despite grandiose, chiming piano chords and silky smooth “oohs” and “aahs”, Wilson could never get on board. He revealed that ‘Sail on Sailor’ was “the only song that we do that I do absolutely don’t like at all. I never liked ‘Sailor on Sailor’ I thought it was but the most… I thought the lyrics were very weird, the lyrics didn’t make any sense […] they were so off-the-wall kind of lyrics I never could get on board.”
Who is to blame, then? Might these just be the dreary vituperations of a diary entry after one too many joints, or some uninspired character study from a children’s book, a voyager that “works the seaways, the gale-swept seaways”, and is dragged, drenched, and battered by the currents?
On the contrary, Wilson was an avid collaborator and wrote some of his best work surrounded by the fizzing, firing minds of his generation. In that vein, Wilson wrote the song at night, candle-wicks burning down atmospherically around him. The late star recounted, “I had some friends over, and this guy named Ray Kennedy wrote the original lyric, and then somebody somewhere wrote another set of lyrics, and I never found out who it was.”
As if in recognition that the tale of an anonymous songwriter is hard to believe, Wilson added, “I never found out who wrote the actual lyrics to the song on the record.” At that point, Wilson’s biggest regret was not wrangling creative control back in a song that stretched and slinked in all the right ways.
However, Wilson would curiously regain his memory over the matter. Despite previously sharing his hatred for the track, he went on to personally select the single to be one of 19 tracks on the Beach Boys release Classics Selected by Brian Wilson.
When explaining his odd choice, he thickened the outlines of the blotchy story he’d once shared over the creative conception of the nautical track: “Van Dyke really inspired this one. We worked on it originally; then, the other collaborators contributed some different lyrics. By the time the Beach Boys recorded it, the lyrics were all over the place. But I love how this song rocks.”
That just goes to show: If Wilson can get past his biggest regret and turn it into one of his greatest achievements, there’s hope for us all.
