(Credits: Far Out / Brian Wilson)
Wed 19 November 2025 22:00, UK
There’s no real definition to accurately describe what Brian Wilson was able to do with harmony.
Although everyone gets their musical bag of tricks from somewhere, what Wilson did on Pet Sounds almost defies any kind of explanation because of how detailed and layered every single song is. But even when Wilson was being compared to the great tunesmiths of days gone by, he felt that some of the greatest composers of all time were too complicated for what he was trying to do.
Then again, we’re still working on figuring out every single thing that Wilson did while he was on this Earth. Even when doing the most throwaway string park behind the scenes, he would be able to make the most beautiful piece of music anyone had ever heard in the time that it would take you or I to make a half-decent sandwich for lunch. But for all of his gifts, Wilson never saw himself as a particular genius of any kind.
From day one, he seemed to have the most humble personality of anyone in rock and roll, and most of the time, he would have been happy to know that there were people out there who were enjoying his music rather than worry about whether he was living up to the legacy of a musical icon. But it’s not like he didn’t feel a kinship with the finest composers who ever lived whenever he heard their works.
After all, it’s no surprise that everyone compares Wilson’s ear for melody to Mozart. Although the classical genius’s composition process may be exaggerated in the movie Amadeus, it didn’t seem all that dissimilar to how Wilson worked behind the scenes a lot of the time, but The Beach Boys’ mastermind ended up finding more of a kinship in the way that Bach created his masterpieces.
His songs weren’t exactly classical music, but he did feel pieces of his music taking cues from what Bach did, saying, “In lots of interviews people have asked me what I would have been if I’d been born in a different time. I think I would have been a classical composer. But not like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky. I would have been like Bach, using counterpoint, layering things. Of all the composers, he’s the one who makes the most sense to me.”
But it’s not like Bach is completely taboo to rock and roll. Wilson may have been interested in seeing how he layered different harmonies, but Bach’s sense of counterpoint was also a big part of what interested other songwriters, with Paul Simon basing ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ on a Bach chorale and Paul McCartney taking inspiration from Bach’s Bouree when coming up with ‘Blackbird’.
If you look at how Wilson put together his masterpieces, though, it makes all the sense in the world that he would be drawing from Bach. If you take all of the instruments out of ‘God Only Knows’ and only leave the voices, the arrangement isn’t all that different from what you would hear in a traditional classical piece, with every voice playing their own distinct melody over top of each other.
So while it was going to take a genius to truly understand what was going on in Wilson’s head half the time, he always felt a connection with how those composers made their music. It was about finding the right melody floating in the air, and all it took was that short amount of time for it to get to his fingers when he sat at the piano.
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