Credit: Far Out / Brian Wilson
Tue 11 August 2026 22:00, UK
Music was like medicine for Brian Wilson at the best of times.
As much as he seemed like a musical machine in many respects who could pump out hits faster than people could digest them, a song like ‘In My Room’ was about a lot more than him being shut away in his room. He saw his room as his safe haven where he could do anything he wanted with harmony, but there were more than a few times when his own genius almost turned against him whenever he made one of his classics.
If he had spent the rest of his career making nothing but a bunch of surf tunes, that would have been enough for him to build a career off of, but he didn’t need to stay in one spot for too long. Pet Sounds had proved to everyone that he was a force of nature that could make some of the most immaculate pop tunes ever created, but he didn’t usually have the right people around him to encourage him properly.
Each of his brothers knew that he was a genius to some degree, but listening through a lot of the sessions that Smile was supposed to be, Wilson was clearly headed for something far more expansive, but didn’t have the proper bearings to make everything work out. It also didn’t help that some of his British counterparts had beaten him at his own game when he first heard The Beatles’ Sgt Peppers.
The concept record was among the greatest watermarks of the 1960s, and Wilson knew that the game was over when he heard that. They were moving into new directions that he couldn’t even imagine with The Beach Boys, but he did give it a good shot when working on ‘Good Vibrations’. Because when looking at the song as a whole, the whole thing sounds like the beginning of something epic.
There had been overture-style pieces at the beginning of ‘California Girls’, but this was the first avant-garde style piece that Wilson ever managed to land on the charts. He was throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the arrangement to make sure everything sounded perfect, but he also realised that he had made something too jarring for even him to take in whenever he listened to it.
Which is why for decades after he made his masterpiece, Wilson could never bring himself to actually play it in passing, saying, “It’s scary, scary stuff that I don’t like to listen to. As a matter of fact, I would go out of my way not to hear ‘Good Vibrations’. I would go anywhere not to hear something that scary.” That might sound insane these days, but you have to remember what instruments like the theremin sounded like at the time.
Further reading: From The Vault
No one was making songs with those strange sounds, and while the Moog synthesiser became much more prevalent and made even stranger sounds, Wilson knew that there was something a bit more sinister about what they did. The song is nothing but a bright pop song, but the pop odyssey that it goes on is something that Wilson was more proud to have made than to actually listen to himself.
But that’s really a testament to the kind of song that he was working with at the time as well. He could do a lot of different things when he had the right instrument at his disposal, but there were more than a few times when he knew that there was no way of getting all of those perfect melodies together in the same place all over again.
