Go to your record collection, or open up Spotify, and have a look for the Beach Boys’ 1965 single, The Little Girl I Once Knew. Like many songs Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote between 1963 and 1966, The Little Girl I Once Knew is about the dislocation and trauma of leaving innocence behind, but it’s not – compared to, say, Please Let Me Wonder – one that graphically maps out Wilson’s anxieties in the lyrics.
READ MORE: The Beach Boys' 50 Greatest Songs
Instead, hesitancy is baked into the very structure of the song. It begins cautiously, Carol Kaye’s bassline arriving by stealth, before suddenly opening up into one of Wilson’s most radiant miniature symphonies. After 32 seconds, though, a compositional rupture appears and the song stops. For the best part of three seconds there’s a vacuum, before the music jolts back into life. The effect is destabilising, and Wilson evidently enjoys it so much that he pulls it off again at 1:08.
A small trick in the great expanse of Wilson’s genius, perhaps, but it’s also an impactful one. The Beach Boys had already released three albums (including their first two classics: The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days) and four other singles in 1965, but now Wilson had found yet another new way to make radical music out of emotional uncertainty, to both supercharge and complicate the hormonal currents of pop. It was a pause that could – and did – speak volumes.
“Turn it up, turn it right up. It's GOT to be a hit. It’s the greatest record I’ve heard for weeks,” John Lennon raved in December 1965, reviewing the new singles for Melody Maker. “It’s all Brian Wilson. He just uses the voices as instruments. He never tours or anything. He just sits at home thinking up fantastic arrangements out of his head. Doesn’t even read music. You keep waiting for the fabulous breaks. Great arrangement. It goes on and on with all different things. I hope it’s a hit so I can hear it all the time. Can I have that?”
Radio DJs, however, were less enthusiastic. The tension, anticipation, full stops and releases that so excited Lennon proved challenging to programmers – how to cope with three seconds of dead air? Wilson’s musical audacity hadn’t previously prevented him from having hits. A few months earlier California Girls, and its 23-second intro of dreamy SoCal baroque, had climbed to Number 3 on the Billboard charts. But The Little Girl I Once Knew stalled at Number 20, the group’s lowest placing since Little Saint Nick two years earlier.
“It was one of our best, but it didn’t sell at all,” Wilson remembered in his second (and more trustworthy) autobiography, 2016’s I Am Brian Wilson. “And when records didn’t sell at all, record companies started to put pressure on us. They wanted more music fast. I didn’t have more music fast. I was exploring.”
By most people’s standards, Wilson was exploring at remarkable speed. Six months after The Little Girl I Once Knew, The Beach Boys unveiled Pet Sounds, a 36-minute crystallisation of everything he’d been working towards over the previous few years. An album that located a very specific, personal sense of emotional upheaval in Hawthorne, Los Angeles, and universalised it. That stress-tested the parameters of rock’n’roll – not as a mendacious act of subversion, but as a basic creative imperative. This, Wilson implied on Pet Sounds, was what pop records could aspire to, could be. But, as the next 60 years of music have made clear, no-one could make pop records quite like Brian Wilson.
There is no hierarchy of deaths, as such, but some hit harder than others, and a few feel like something momentous and irreparable has happened to the foundations of our culture. The passing of Brian Wilson on June 11, 2025, was one of those occasions – the second in three days, horrifyingly, after Sly Stone died, also aged 82, on June 9.
It is easy with Wilson (as indeed it is with Stone) to be distracted by the drama of his life at one remove from the music: the cruelty he endured from his father Murry Wilson and, later, his psychologist Eugene Landy among many others – including, probably, at least one of his bandmates; the mental health issues, sometimes exacerbated by drugs, that derailed him for decades. It’d be desirable to avoid mention of those struggles and concentrate on the music Brian Wilson made between the first Beach Boys single (Surfin’), in November 1961, and his final live appearance (at the Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkston, Michigan) in July 2022.
But Wilson’s troubles were not, really, far removed from his art. If his music originally came from a vision of American life idealised, a romantic mythology of the beaches, soda fountains and suburbs, the understanding that all was not quite perfect arrived early, too. By September 1963’s Surfer Girl, the third Beach Boys album, Wilson was grappling with a nuance and sophistication at odds with the band’s hearty image – if not with his own neuroses. Even pretend surfers didn’t, as a rule, admit a need to “lock out all my worries and my fears”, as Wilson did on In My Room. “Rock’n’roll and sadness combined? Yeah, that’s it,” he confirmed to MOJO in 2004. “Sad songs make you feel good.”
“He’d only want to talk about music at the start,” Tony Asher, the lyricist entrusted with finding the words for Wilson’s feelings on Pet Sounds, told MOJO in 2012. “But later on, we got into discussions of philosophy, and I soon saw a complex personality emerge. The lyrical ideas he’d suggest were a combination of naivety and romanticism, with a sadness behind it.”
READ MORE: Tony Asher Remembers Brian Wilson: “I saw a complex personality emerge…”
There’s a way of looking at Wilson’s entire career that presents him as a man fundamentally unnerved by how adult life has turned out to be less straightforward than he’d hoped. Up to and including Pet Sounds, you can hear him trying to come to terms with this reality, articulating his fears with a candour uncommon to pop music. By Smile, and much of what followed, he often strives to avoid coming to terms with it; to recapture some perceived kind of innocence – for himself and for America – with an intensity that can become hallucinogenic. One of his last solo albums, 2011’s In The Key Of Disney, sees him tackle a children’s songbook of cartoon showstoppers. It closes with a song Wilson claimed had inspired Surfer Girl: When You Wish Upon A Star, “as dreamers do”.
In a MOJO interview around the time his reconstruction of Smile was released in 2004, Wilson talked about the tent he erected in a room of his Bel Air mansion in 1966, a domestic campsite where he could regress, albeit using the grown-up tools of the time. “I thought it would be a creative idea,” he told Sylvie Simmons. “We smoked marijuana in it and took LSD. I smoked a lot – every day. It got me deeper into the music, but it scared me too… [LSD] was a very religious experience. I think my music is spiritual. I think we sound like a choir [on Our Prayer], a little boys’ choir. I think we had a sound that sounded like kids – an innocence, that’s what it was.”
In other ways, of course, the man in the fireman’s helmet was fooling no-one. For all his pursuit of childlike states, Wilson had long been operating at a musical level hard to comprehend for even his most elevated peers. Paul McCartney, in a 1990 interview that eventually surfaced on the 1997 Pet Sounds Sessions boxset, talked to David Leaf about how Pet Sounds “blew me out of the water”. “I love the album so much,” McCartney continued. “I’ve just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life – I figure no-one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard that album.”
Wilson was a revolutionary in the recording studio not just because of the music he made there, but because of the complete autonomy with which he made it. His freedom and control, as an artist who produced himself, were unparalleled for the time; there was no George Martin figure, let alone a Phil Spector, to police his ambitions. And if Wilson’s insecurities were legion, how he directed the cream of LA’s session men and women on Pet Sounds and Smile is illuminating. It’s not just the multi-faceted intricacies of the music he’s manifesting, it’s the unwavering confidence and brisk charm with which he puts these Wrecking Crew vets through their paces.
Listen to an early attempt at Do You Like Worms from October 1966 (it’s listed as Part 1 on the 2011 Smile Sessions box). At 32 seconds, Wilson halts the assembled musicians to interrogate Carol Kaye’s bass-playing until it precisely matches the sound in his head. “You were strumming it too hard – that’s it,” he calmly explains to Kaye. “I knew I’d find it if I really searched and reached out. OK let’s play it a little softer, Carol.”
“Brian was in charge of it all back then,” Kaye remembered to MOJO in 2012. “He even picked up engineering pretty fast from [engineer] Chuck Britz… He wasn’t hamstrung by rules, where the instruments were relegated to set roles, and he heard everything from the bass up.
“Rock’n’rollers in the ’60s needed studio musicians to invent the lines for them – except Frank Zappa and Brian, they knew what they wanted. Brian would turn up with the music written out… He’d play the song at the piano so we’d get the feel, and he’d almost always go back to the booth and talk from there, and then we’d start playing. It could get frustrating because we’d only do one tune per three-hour session, while most did four or five tunes.”
READ MORE: Carol Kaye Remembers Brian Wilson: “We thought, Good god, what is he doing?”
Hardened pros on the clock couldn’t deflect Wilson from the spur-of-the-moment innovations and relentless takes it required to negotiate perfection. The first session for Good Vibrations, on February 17, 1966, involved 28 instrumental passes at the song, many featuring an electro-theremin played by its co-inventor, Paul Tanner. Twenty-plus sessions, around 30 musicians, four studios, 80 hours of tape, $50,000 of costs and seven months later, it was finished.
“You know how sometimes you go, I don't like it, and then you go back to it?” Wilson pondered in 1997, when MOJO anointed Good Vibrations as the greatest single of all time. “I did many different versions because I was experimenting to see what I liked best. I needed the voices to be mellow enough so that not all of them are heard. The voices that aren’t heard are creating background vibrations. That blows the listener’s mind because of the sound, you mix the voices so you hear them, but you don’t really hear them.”
It was, as Wilson put it, “a very subtle mix idea”. Good Vibrations was rich with secret harmonies lurking behind the riot of melodies, but there was a vigorous clarity to the arrangement, too. While Wilson’s idol, Phil Spector, would pack the studio with musicians to construct an impenetrable wall of sound, Wilson’s equivalent was vivid in its detailing and separation: not a note, a sound, a player wasted or obscured.
When Good Vibrations was finally released as a single, in October 1966, it became a Number 1 record in the US and the UK. But the commercial viability of what was due to come next – Smile – was being challenged by Wilson’s label, Capitol, and some of his fellow Beach Boys, even as the album was some distance from completion. By the spring of 1967 Wilson, in a crisis of confidence, had abandoned the project. “Every beautifully designed, finely-wrought inspirationally-welded piece of music made these last months by Brian and his Beach Boy craftsmen has been SCRAPPED,” sometime Beach Boys press agent Derek Taylor announced in Disc And Music Echo on May 6. “What, then? I don’t know. The Beach Boys don’t know. Brian Wilson, God grant him peace of mind… he doesn’t know.”
Smile’s idea of innocence, perhaps, came burdened with too much complexity. Brian Wilson made his first retreat from the world at the end of 1964, when a mid-flight breakdown – apparently caused by anxiety over the state of his recent marriage to Marilyn Rovell – resulted in a withdrawal from touring. The termination of Smile in spring ’67, though, prompted near-total dislocation. Now, his bandmates found themselves having to share the studio and songwriting work as well as the touring and singing work (“Every day, we were like journeyman carpenters,” Al Jardine told MOJO in 2021. “We’d go in the studio and record”), a development that unearthed dormant talents in his brothers Carl and Dennis, especially.
READ MORE: Al Jardine On Brian Wilson: “The humble giant has passed…”
Brian’s contributions, on the occasions when he was present in his home studio rather than hiding in his bedroom, were startling in their directness and simplicity. His genius was not just built on elaboration and filigreed layers, it transpired; the songs were every bit as beautiful and involving when they came relatively unadorned.
The MOJO writer John Harris, on his Maybe I’m Amazed Substack about music and neurodiversity, writes in reference to Wilson that “Often from childhood, a prodigious memory, heightened sensitivity to sound, ear for detail and instinctive mastery of chords and notes will be accompanied by some other clear traits: a liking for solitude, an aversion to the complexities of etiquette, or problems mastering what psychologists call executive function – planning how you get from A to B to C.”
One method of dealing with that challenge for Wilson, perhaps, was writing a song about it. Some of his best tracks from the late ’60s and 1970s engage in the banalities of ordinary life with a focus that can be unsettling until you realise that memorialising everyday achievements is a critical act of coping. Busy Doin’ Nothin’, a bossa nova-tinged highlight of 1968’s Friends, is explicitly about getting through the day – “I had to fix a lot of things this morning/ Because they were so scrambled” – and, in the course of doing so, provides specific directions on how to find Wilson’s house: “Left on a little road, it’s a bumpy one.” The stress unexpected visitors would presumably have caused him at the time is, understandably, not addressed.
These were funny songs, too, imbued with a self-deprecating sensibility not always easy to parse. 1977’s Beach Boys Love You, with its goofy tunes about Johnny Carson and Honkin’ Down The Highway, its post-verbal rave-ups like Ding Dang, has been frequently patronised as some kind of naïve “outsider” art. But it might be better understood as the work of a musician who, in the midst of personal distress, finds joy in fragments of normality and a release in absurdity. There are few Beach Boys albums Wilson writes about more enthusiastically in I Am Brian Wilson, not least his thrill at once more embracing new music technology when he plays his basslines on Moog and ARP synths. “I was able to use the studio again the way that I used it with Pet Sounds,” he explains, “and I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my thirties, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my twenties… The overall mood was trying to celebrate good things even if they were surrounded by problems.”
Then, three paragraphs later: “In 1978 I went back to a mental hospital in San Diego.”
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In August 1995, I visited Brian Wilson at home in LA, ostensibly to talk about two tasteful new records he’d made: an album of stripped-back old songs with Don Was producing, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times; and a shift as lead vocalist on Van Dyke Parks’ latest collection of California fantasias, Orange Crate Art.
It was, by any measure, a memorable experience. Wilson sat at his grand piano and played the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction and a heartbreaking version of Surfer Girl, the latter with a new bridge he’d written to console himself when feeling down, then offered me $100 to get my instant recording of it played on the radio. He talked – not always entirely seriously – about the power he gained by abstaining from orgasms; about his volatile ongoing relationships with his old bandmates (“The Beach Boys are being assholes to me… I oughta beat the hell out of them”); about the auditory hallucinations and the depression which plagued him. At one point, he banged his glass of Diet Coke down hard on the kitchen table and announced, “Big Brian is not scared of anybody and Little Brian is scared of everybody. So that’s my problem.”
Much of what Wilson said, and how he said it, was troubling. But there was also a sense that with the help of his second wife, Melinda Ledbetter, his schizoaffective disorder and overall health were being properly managed and prioritised, and his career was gradually beginning to regain at least a semblance of logic. The 17 years since The Beach Boys Love You had not been uneventful, packed as they were with breakdowns, addictions, interventions well-meaning and otherwise, lawsuits, estrangements and one problematic autobiography (1991’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Mike Love, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, and Wilson’s mother Audree all sued for defamation).
Records, though, had been scarce, Wilson’s involvement with Beach Boys projects perhaps mercifully peripheral. One fully-realised solo album, Brian Wilson, emerged in 1988, substantially better than it could’ve been given the malign presence of Eugene Landy as “executive producer”. Plenty more sessions still remain unreleased, from …Love You’s pointedly titled, instantly shelved follow-up_,_ Adult/Child (now being released later this year), to the early ’90s sessions where producer Andy Paley helped Wilson re-engage with his meticulous peak ’60s sound. The possibility of one last great album seemed just about plausible. As things turned out, however, the reality of Brian Wilson’s last act was substantially more far-fetched.
Pop star lives rarely conform to the sort of neat redemption arcs that we – as journalists, biographers, film-makers and maybe sometimes even fans – try to impose upon them. But when Wilson returned to touring in 1999, a reclusive creature of the studio finally enjoying the validation of live audiences, his story felt as if it were heading to a miraculous and, against all odds, satisfying conclusion. By 2002, he and his ten-piece band of diligent musical scholars were recreating Pet Sounds in all its rococo’d pathos and splendour. “The band, the harmonies, are immaculate, seamless – you don’t hear the work that must have gone into this,” marvelled Sylvie Simmons, reporting for MOJO on the tour’s first night at London’s Royal Festival Hall. “They're so scarily good, you hold your breath in case the man whose vision it all was blows it when he joins in. He doesn’t. You exhale.”
Then, two years later, Wilson and his keen young “musical secretary” Darian Sahanaja stitched the fragments of Smile into a cohesive whole, re-recorded it all, and took the ultimate studio confection out on the road. I Am Brian Wilson begins with him sat in the empty Royal Festival Hall, composing himself before the first official unveiling of Smile in its 2004-vintage entirety. “It’s a way of bringing something back that looked like it would stay in the past,” Wilson writes (with the aid of Ben Greenman, who also collaborated on Sly Stone’s autobiography). “Music takes what’s inside me and puts it into the world around me. It’s my way of showing people things I can’t show any other way.”
For all of Wilson's emotional transparency in his music, however, it’s hard to imagine quite how he felt, night after night, playing tracks from Smile like Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow (aka Fire) that had exacerbated such debilitating paranoia in him first time round. Was it purgative? Or was the triumph more prosaic if no less valuable – that by turning these loaded pieces of music into routine repertoire, Wilson effectively denuded them of their more damaging personal implications? Perhaps, in the end, they were just songs after all?
The greater significance of Pet Sounds, and Smile, and much more from the depths of Wilson’s Beach Boys catalogue, was not lost on his audience, at least. While Mike Love led the continuity Beach Boys around state fairs, Wilson’s new home was in symphony halls. Love leaned hard into the nostalgic frisson of the surf era songs; Wilson found his work reframed and consolidated – not unreasonably – as some of the greatest art of the 20th Century. “I made barnyard sounds like everyone else,” Love confessed to MOJO in 2012, “But I am commercially very competitive.”
Wilson’s solo shows, as they stretched on over the years, could sometimes feel a little awkward as his health fluctuated, and his 21st century albums were certainly not all avant-garde masterpieces. But if The Beach Boys had sustained a lucrative touring business without him, they also grasped, as their 50th anniversary approached, that a reunion with Wilson could bring commercial value as well as critical cachet. When MOJO visited a reformed band – Wilson, Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston and original guitarist David Marks – promoting a 29th album, That’s Why God Made The Radio, and in rehearsal for their anniversary tour, the agenda focused on reconciling the two factions and cultures of The Beach Boys.
Jeff Foskett, a guitarist/musical director and, by extension, career diplomat who’d served time in both Wilson’s band and The Beach Boys, explained to Barney Hoskyns how the tensions were supposedly balancing out: “Brian’s love of the recreation of the music in its exact form and Mike’s outgoing personality and stage banter is going to make it a really fun show…”
Whether everyone found Mike Love’s antics quite so much fun is a moot point. But the underlying concept was sound, the battle between the two ideologies something of a phoney war, at least aesthetically (the business situation, as usual, was another matter). The purest idea of The Beach Boys was both profound and sentimental, radical and comforting, and embraced all extremes simultaneously. Pop. Art. Pop as art. Art as pop. All at once, in perfect harmony.
One last song to dig out. The closing track on the Beach Boys’ 2012 reunion album is a song called Summer’s Gone, credited to the odd triumvirate of Brian Wilson, producer Joe Thomas, and Jon Bon Jovi. Thomas told journalists that Wilson had begun Summer’s Gone a few years earlier, specifically envisaging it as the final track on the final Beach Boys record, and in its completed form it’s a song, gilded with the harmonies of old comrades, that feels custom-built to push a bunch of heavily signposted buttons. Friends have passed on; the nights are growing cold; Wilson resolves to linger at the beach and watch the waves. “We laugh, we cry, we live, we die,” he sings, “And dream about our yesterday.”
On one level it’s unmediated schmaltz, right down to the last breaker hitting the beach on the fadeout – though as Wilson proved countless times, it would be foolish to underestimate the emotional heft that schmaltz can harbour. On another level, the song’s sheer gorgeousness transcends calculation: a stately meditation on mortality that codes as a sequel to ’Til I Die, with Wilson having survived far longer than he might have expected in 1971.
So much of Brian Wilson’s music pivoted on notions of innocence. His songs, dating as far back as 1968’s Do It Again, were often nostalgic, but they yearned for an uncomplicated past. Summer’s Gone was a rarer beast: a song predicated on experience, that worked towards a kind of peace with all that had happened, rather than trying to obliterate it.
In 1995, I asked Wilson if he’d have sacrificed his creativity to have avoided all of his mental health issues. He tried to change the subject, but Melinda Ledbetter steered him gently back to the point. “If,” she asked her husband, “you could have a life free of depression and auditory hallucinations, free of all the emotional insecurity that you’ve gone through, would you trade that with having your life with music?”
“No,” he answered, quietly.
Music’s so important to you that you’re prepared to go through the rough times?
This time, his answer was even quieter. “Yeah. Oh yeah.”
Thank you to Martin Aston, Rob Chapman, David Dalton, Bill DeMain, Tom Doyle, Bill Holdship, Barney Hoskyns, David Leaf, Domenic Priore, Sylvie Simmons and Tim Sommer, among many others, for their reporting on Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys in MOJO over the years.
This article originally appeared in MOJO 382.
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"Music takes what’s inside me and puts it into the world…" – Mojo Magazine
