Credit: Far Out / Caribou Records / Public Domain
Sat 26 September 2026 18:30, UK
Anyone would have been happy to have Brian Wilson in their corner if they were working on their records.
Even when The Beach Boys mastermind was at his lowest creatively, the fact that he could create a string arrangement out of midair is the kind of talent that most people couldn’t reach, even if they worked at their craft for decades. He was gifted with some of the best ears in the business, but that didn’t mean that everyone had to share the same sentiments that he did when looking at his own records.
But given the nature of where The Beach Boys have gone, there’s a good chance Wilson wanted nothing to do with that side of his sound all that often. He knew what made a brilliant record, but since Mike Love tended to turn back to the typical fun in the sun songs that they were known for, it’s not like Wilson was itching to make records like that every time he went to the studio.
He knew that he could take the band further than that, but there were a few musical leaps he had to take before he was ready for Pet Sounds. He was slowly testing the waters on his previous records, and by the time that he released his 1966 masterpiece, things looked like they were bound to be perfect. But that’s not really what happened when he eventually started putting together the different pieces of the record.
As much as he loved what he had created, there were a bunch of people more perplexed than anything when they heard the album. Pet Sounds was too far ahead of the times in many respects, and while Wilson was dejected that his songs fell on deaf ears, he wasn’t going to stop experimenting. But the more that he tested himself, the more lost he felt.
His road to making Smile was one of the most tragic falls from grace, and while he was confined to his home after that, it’s not like he couldn’t still create music. He was at arm’s length from the rest of the band for a long time, but even if the band did include tunes like ‘Surf’s Up’ on some of their later albums, it wasn’t until The Beach Boys Love You that Wilson felt like he was back in full force.
He once said, “This is my favourite album we ever did. It’s funny because now people are beginning to see it as a classic. It was quite revolutionary in its use of synthesisers. It’s got so much good stuff on it, ‘Ding Dang’, ‘Let Us Go On This Way’ and ‘The Night Was So Young’. I think it’s overlooked. Everything’s going on in there.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Favourite or not, it’s not like he was 100% back yet. The songs on the record do have a bit more of a sophomoric approach to lyrics, and it can get downright creepy hearing a grown man sing the lines to ‘Roller Skating Child’, and it’s not like the public took too kindly to this kind of record when it was released.
Even to this day, the album has yet to go gold in the US, only selling 400,000 copies, and not faring much better across the pond. The version of Wilson that everyone knew looked a lot different, but it’s easy to see what some of the supporters of the record, like Patti Smith, saw in it when they were first listening to it at the time.
Given that Wilson had spent so much time away from the limelight and contemplating his place in the world, this was the sound of him trying to rediscover the childhood that he never had through song. It wasn’t always easy, and it could get more than a little bit alarming, but maybe the reason why he claimed this album as his favourite was because of how much of his personality was put into his tunes.
