Game Changer: Brian Wilson

“There is no god and Brian Wilson is his son.” In 1966, for the third, Andy Warhol–designed issue of Aspen magazine, Lou Reed wrote “The View from the Bandstand,” a deadpan subjective essay on the present condition of rock music. Reed’s band the Velvet Underground were already performing such verbally and sonically harsh songs as “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs” as part of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia show; a gushy regard for the cloudless harmonies of the Beach Boys may seem unlikely on his part, or just a camp feint. In fact, though, he had recently sung lead vocals on at least one track by the Surfsiders, the house band at Pickwick Records, who, in 1965, put out a cash-in album of Beach Boys covers with Lou adding laconic texture to the pure teen fare of “Little Deuce Coupe.” In his Aspen piece, Reed hymns the slightly antiquarian project of Wilson’s group: marrying the sweetness of doo-wop to combustible rock ’n’ roll—twin specters of the 1950s in transcendent 1960s pop. (Reed might easily be describing aspects of the Velvet Underground here, despite that band’s downtown art trappings.) But Wilson had gone further, says Reed, arguing that his main innovation was to expand or distort the harmonic structures of pop: “Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with THE CHORDS.”

At the time of Wilson’s death, aged eighty-two, in June 2025, he seemed to have gotten his due, enjoying with age a recognition for the complexity and daring of his music that had eluded him at the height of his musical powers and commercial success. (These had not exactly coincided.) In his last decades Wilson emerged from mental illness, addiction, and reclusive legend (blinds drawn, rising at noon to go nowhere, the Howard Hughes of sunshine pop), reconciled with feuding bandmates, and was able to revisit lost or stymied projects to renewed critical acclaim. But with the death of an artist of Wilson’s stature, certain tensions, lapses, and longueurs—and triumphs, too—can be flattened in the aftermath. The death of David Bowie in 2016 is perhaps the most instructive and dispiriting example: highs and lows were smoothed out into a plain story of unwavering genius and implausible geniality. The extremity of Wilson’s ambitions, the monomania that seized him both in his mid-1960s pomp and during the long comedown, the hinterland wreckage of personal life and professional relations, and even the eerie beauty of the Beach Boys’ records: all of this is easily missed in celebration of a dead star’s pure love of music.

Of course Reed was right about THE CHORDS—Wilson, as the group’s main songwriter and producer, took the harmonies of barbershop, doo-wop, and Everly Brothers–style pop and made them more massed and complex, introducing nonpop chords and buried vocal dissonances. In terms of an influence you could notate musically, aside from a well-known effect on the Beatles, people like the Band and Crosby, Stills & Nash owed him something. (The truth about the laid-back and would-be authentic sounds of the late ’60s and early ’70s is just how severely technical such music needed to be.) But as Bryan Ferry once crooned, notes could not spell out the score—Wilson’s innovations were as much sonic as musical, maybe more so. He wanted to emulate the teeming Phil Spector sound—especially the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963)—but his masterpiece Pet Sounds (1966) made Spector’s “wall of sound” seem distinctly two-dimensional. On this defiantly mono record from 1966, the palette is stretched and smeared. The best Wilson productions are often bass heavy, deploying not just the muted punch of (among others) Carol Kaye’s Fender Precision bass but an array of other low registers, whether horns or, as memorably on “I Know There’s an Answer,” bass harmonica. Before and after Pet Sounds came a whole idiosyncratic expanse of sound and atmosphere: a keening youthful melancholy, carried high on the inshore wind, haunts songs like “The Warmth of the Sun” (1964), “Caroline, No” from Pet Sounds, and “Surf’s Up” (1967).

In conventional narratives of 1960s musical innovation, Pet Sounds is seen as an experimental foray beyond the Beatles’ Revolver of the previous year, and then a prompt to the psychedelic novelties of Sgt. Pepper. But “experiment” may not be the word. As Tom Petty once pointed out, Wilson had to book dozens of session musicians for these records, and then supply them with their parts. It wasn’t a matter of improvisation and adventure; he had to have heard it all in his head beforehand. In the long term that proved an impossible way to work; for the next projected Beach Boys album, Smile—ultimately abandoned amid internecine squabbles and Wilson’s worsening emotional state—he developed instead a modular approach, recording instrumental and vocal passages in many different studios and collaging the whole together on tape. Both methods, and both records, produced their own forms of pristine abstraction, and contributed in their different ways to a decline in the group’s popularity. Wilson could also do ramshackle, short-order recording: Smiley Smile (1967), released in place of the botched Smile, was recorded at his home with radio-broadcast equipment. But whichever approach he took, this was Wilson’s game-changing gift: he was the precursor of all the musicians and producers who have seen the album as a total work of art—and of those who have paid the price for such dreams.

When I think of the musicians and records that Brian Wilson made possible, I don’t call to mind music that sounds remotely like the Beach Boys. Instead I think of obsessive, often solitary work in pursuit of the most extravagant sounds. Stevie Wonder’s transfiguration from Motown prodigy to studio-bound magus and futuristic visionary. Prince in his imperial phase of the mid-to-late 1980s. Kate Bush’s commercially disastrous The Dreaming (1982) and its redeemed, more popular twin Hounds of Love (1985). Almost any solo album by Björk, but especially later records like Biophilia (2011). All joyous, giddy versions of a songwriter’s expansive fantasy, yet manifesting total control of sound and structure. Wilson is also the patron saint of all who suffer from the rigors of such ecstasy. He made the svelte span of an album—a mere thirty-five minutes in the case of Pet Sounds—the vehicle for one artist’s ambiguous state of mind: childlike, romantic, anxious, nostalgic, obsessive. And he provided a template for the pain that may ensue when that’s not enough, or the world doesn’t (yet) want to know.