Brian Wilson, the heart and troubled mind behind the Beach Boys’ most transcendent work, has left the room. He was 82.
To call Pet Sounds his masterpiece doesn’t quite capture it. That record wasn’t just the high point of the Beach Boys’ discography—it was Brian’s interior world, poured into wax. Released in 1966, Pet Sounds challenged the very idea of the pop formula built on one-dimensional hits. He wasn’t interested in just churning out hits; he was building sonic cathedrals with high-frequency harmonies, fragments of pure sadness, and bursts of hope. He stacked layers of instruments and vocals, creating an enveloping soundscape that could, at times, overwhelm.
I am still convinced only Brian Wilson could have done it—only he could have translated dreams into something so lush, so haunted. In mono, no less. A choice not merely about sound, but about clarity of vision. And that vision was singular.
My favorite Beach Boys song is “Hang On to Your Ego,” later softened and retitled “I Know There’s an Answer.” Even in its altered form, you can hear the tension between Brian’s artistic intent and the cautious, pandering hands trying to make him palatable.
The song’s serrated beauty lies in its unusual verse structure (dividing the lyrics into two sections: an eight-bar passage and a six-bar passage) and in lines like “They come on like they’re peaceful/ But inside they’re so uptight.” It wasn’t necessarily about LSD or the era’s excesses so much as it was about seeing the world differently and being punished for it. If you’ve ever felt out of step with this wild, weird world, he had a song for you that moved to its own logic.
Brian’s music is embedded into my DNA—just as essential and automatic as anything I was born with. He didn’t need to say much to say everything. He was a champion of the misunderstood, and more than that—a composer of emotional topographies that didn’t need lyrics to be understood.
Maybe he was never made for these times. But somehow, through the noise, he gave us the soundtrack for surviving them.