When my oldest sister was in high school, she sang in the chorus. We lived just outside of Boston then, and my father had finished off half of the basement into two bedrooms and I guess kind of a den. That's where the record player was. My sister would sit down there for hours practicing singing to certain records. Being a 9-year-old pain in the ass, of course, meant that I had to wander downstairs and bother her on occasion.
When it was time to practice harmonies, she played two records in particular: Best of The Beach Boys Volume 2 and Surf’s Up. The songs were catchy, but it went deeper than that. Even my little punk ass noticed how pleasing the harmonies were. Lush and complicated. And delivered with incredible precision.
I became a fan.
Brian Wilson was my first musical hero. He was the genius behind the Beach Boys. The songwriter. The arranger. The producer. And a great singer with a lofty range that was clear and powerful even up into the falsetto.
Brian was a perfectionist. It's likely you've heard the song California Girls once or twice. While recording it in April of 1965, working with the legendary studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, it required 44 takes before Brian decided they had achieved a satisfactory recording of the backing tracks. God only knows how many takes it took to get the vocals.
By the time I was in middle school, I was reading Rolling Stone magazine regularly, whenever I could get my hands on one. I don't know, I must have read some mention of how brilliant the album Pet Sounds was, long before it ever achieved the mainstream appreciation it has now.
So I bought a copy.
Would it be fair to say it changed my life? Probably.
Would it be fair to say it changed the future of popular music? I’d say, yes. Here are a few bits I stole from the internet…
“Pet Sounds revolutionized music production and the role of producers, especially through its level of detail and Wilson's use of the studio as compositional tool."
"It elevated popular music as an art form, heightened public regard for albums as cohesive works, and influenced genres like orchestral pop, psychedelia, soft rock, sunshine pop, and progressive rock/pop as well as the adoption of the synthesizer in popular music."
"The album also introduced novel orchestration techniques, chord voicings, and structural harmonies.”
Brian did this when he was 23 years old.
He’d begun hearing voices in his head when he was 20.
At some point, it was decided that he had schizoaffective disorder – which includes symptoms of schizophrenia and a mood disorder.
He struggled with mental illness for the rest of his life.
Obviously, I can’t give you a complete bio here. He was a complicated and troubled man, but here’s the thing that always hits me… All his life, he had a simple goal; to communicate through his music to spread love and mercy to the world.
After releasing an album by that name in 1988, that became his signature sign-off for any correspondence… Love and mercy.
If you haven’t already seen them, I recommend watching the 2021 documentary called Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, and the movie from 2014 called Love and Mercy.
If you’ve never listened to the album Pet Sounds, I urge you to do so. As soon as possible. And I recommend you listen to it as Brian once said it should be heard, on headphones, in the dark, while high.
Brian Wilson died this morning. He was 82.
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