Brian Wilson’s Forever

I have never been to California so my perception of the state is largely mythologized, abstract, and sensory. When I think of California I see shades of red, orange, and yellow: a red 1965 Ford Mustang blazing down the street, streaks of orange slanting through Mexican fan palms, and yellow sand lining the shore, shells peeking out from under their sheets. I see blue, for the blue in the sky, in the sea, and in the glossy boards where the surfers sway in between. I can smell the salt of the ocean, the smoke sputtering from rusted exhausts, and the eucalyptus trees lining the pavement. But most of all, more than anything, I hear The Beach Boys.

Traditionally, two senses are said to be most vital in recalling memories: sight and smell. All our memories are rooted in sight, as each is first conceived by an envisioning, while smell is said to be the most effective in retrieving those once forgotten. So perhaps this is why my pseudo-memories of the West Coast are, on the contrary, easiest to evoke through sound; sure, I see flashes of the scenes above, and I can take phantom whiffs of whatever smells I devise, but when I listen to The Beach Boys, I’m not simply grasping at scraps: instead, I find that I’m really there, with the tide lapping around my feet, sometime in the ‘60s, and it feels perpetual.

With his five-part harmonies, heavy swaths of textures, and lush orchestration layered over intricate percussion: inspired by the vocal complexity of The Four Freshman and Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” The Beach Boys’ frontman, Brian Wilson, pursued sound not just as a craft but as a means of reaching the transcendental. When talking about creating music, he often spoke about being influenced by a kind of divine stirring, as if moved by the hand of God. An interview in 1966 had him dubbing the sounds he created on his piano as “feels,” something that, “once they’re out of my head and into the open air,” he could “see … and touch firmly.” His search for sound took him to lengths that little took: once, enamored by the clinking cutlery at dinner, he asked his guests to keep fiddling with their utensils so he could try to capture that euphoria. Similarly, his infatuation led him to recruit bicycle horns, bells, flutes, harpsichords, harps, pianos, banjos, vibraphones, mandolins, theremins, and even Coke bottles for an album many consider to be his magnum opus, Pet Sounds (1966). A biography of Wilson claims that he once even pronounced that sound could be used to measure the “sweetness in [his] soul,” and that if he were ever in doubt, he would be reassured once he heard himself “singing sweetly” and producing “a sweet sound, all full of love!”

I used to think vulnerability lived in the absence of sound, in moments when we reflect in silence, when serious ceremonies proceed with little to no noise, when confessions are whispered. And naturally, music serves as an extension of life: I saw vulnerable songs as those dressed down to their barest elements—minimal instrumentation, subtle production, murmured lyrics. To bare your soul was to reveal it plainly without any embellishments to hide behind.

But now I see that intimacy can emerge just as powerfully from excess and ornamentation, from music thick with rhapsodic orchestration and layered barbershop harmonies like in the sweeping opulent arrangements of “Surf’s Up” (1971), in the gilded sorrow of “Sloop John B” (1966) as the boys chant that they “want to go home,” and in the slow, swelling harmonies of “Forever” (1970), all songs so sweet they become devastating. 

I’ve come to learn from Wilson that sometimes the most tender things come from reveling in the lush and ornate; vulnerability coming not just from stripping away our defenses but by putting our souls forth in full, with splendor and purpose and total intent. And in these moments I feel like I can reach out and touch its richness, as if these elusive “feels” Wilson speaks of suddenly turned to flesh. It is in paradoxes like these, I think, where Wilson derives his genius. Making sound solid. Turning exuberance into a thing of delicacy. Mixing memories, real and fake.

What always struck me as funny about The Beach Boys is that they weren’t even surfers—Wilson’s younger brother Dennis, who later became the only actual surfer among them, first suggested they embrace surf culture back in 1961 simply because it was something that was happening around them at the time. Even more ironic was that this fiction contributed to both their immense cultural legacy and accusations of boyishness that undercut it. Throughout their career The Beach Boys were frequently dismissed by critics and the general public as being too juvenile, shunned as the West Coast novelty act with the boyish name and gaudy striped shirts. And admittedly, this critique held some truth. For all their musical sophistication, The Beach Boys were, at their core, exactly who they claimed to be: boys enraptured by “the warmth of the sun,” “the love of this whole world,” and “fun, fun, fun.”

Yet what fascinates me most about The Beach Boys is that their profundity came through their frivolity, not despite it. By leaning into and iconizing their ‘60s surfer image they captured something far more enduring: an honest yearning for permanence, a longing for love, a desire to belong, to go home, to stay young, to grow old. Their youth, their cars, their endless summers, all of it became an illusion for something deeper—the very act of casting your net farther than you can pull, a distinctly American ideal to push off from the shore and wade off into the eternal unknown. In short, another of Wilson’s anomalies was his ability to dignify the banality of youth and, in doing so, uncover its sublimity, something the boys would have missed had they ventured into more overtly “serious” avenues of enlightenment.

Similarly to how pop music was rarely produced with the grandeur of a baroque composition, rarely was such normalcy elevated to something so critically acclaimed. The Beach Boys’ songs embraced the American everyday and treated it as something mythic. Take “California Girls” (1965): its chromatic shifts and contrapuntal textures lend wistful complexity to what initially seems a materialistic ode, ultimately becoming a song of both tepid nostalgia and a longing for a dream that never finds form. “In My Room” (1963), a song that John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival once deemed “the truth,” transforms Wilson’s modest reflection on personal space into an anthem of retreat and emotional refuge. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (1966), considered one of the most important songs in pop, opens Pet Sounds with pleas to skip ahead to adulthood. And “All I Wanna Do” from Sunflower (1970), a track so sonically ahead of its time it could be released today, lays the foundation for dream pop decades early, with lyrics that are made immortal through their simple, simple truth: “All I wanna do is bring happiness to you.”

Forever truths rendered both simply and intricately, both in reality and in idealized fiction; neither triumphing over the other. This is what gave Wilson such success in capturing the zeitgeist of California unlike anyone else, while simultaneously transcending the era: their work is equally rooted in the ‘60s surf culture and its juvenility as it is in Wilson’s grand visions of sound. Their supposed simplicity did not preclude depth; rather, it elevated it—and vice versa.

There is much more to say about Wilson that I have yet to mention, such as the quiet, nagging irony in how he created some of the most sonically cheerful songs of the 20th century while caught in the thralls of drug addiction and his domineering father (who was also his manager). Or how, despite his genius production, he was actually deaf in his right ear; and how his devotion to music was, at times, both a sanctuary and a source of profound torment. To put it bluntly, though, on all accounts, his art was one of radical contradiction. I find myself thinking back to something he stated in reference to writing “God Only Knows,” the standout track of Pet Sounds (1966): “it’s like being blind but in being blind, you can see more. You close your eyes; you’re able to see a place or something that's happening.” No metaphor is more apt. Of course Brian was able to see better in the dark. In doing so he gave me a version of California that I’m still trying to understand.

Simplicity and complexity; juvenility and maturity. Memories rooted in fact, those rooted in fiction. Emptiness and fullness; the mundane and the sublime; the abstract and the concrete. The lowbrow and the exalted. The anachronistic, the timeless. Sweet joy and bitter despair.

All are one of the other; each the shadow of its pair. No other man knew this best.

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Madison Kim is a rising junior majoring in English.