Brian Wilson’s legacy is unquestionable — the studio mastermind will live on forever

“The American Mozart” is how Sean Ono Lennon described Brian Wilson in a tribute to The Beach Boys maestro, who died on 11 June at the age of 82. From Questlove to Bob Dylan, the music world at large is flying the flag at half mast for Wilson, by all accounts a genius whose influence shaped the story of pop and rock music in the twentieth century.

Born in Inglewood, California, in 1942, Wilson’s childhood was not an easy one. “My dad’s tirades were unending,” he wrote in his 1991 autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice. “The effects these outbursts had on me were severe. By the time I started elementary school, I was nervous and high-strung, withdrawn and frightened of almost everything.” Wilson nonetheless formed a high school group, initially called the Pendletones, with his younger brothers Carl and Dennis, along with cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine. The band would later change their name to The Beach Boys.

Wilson was already proving himself a capable songwriter, responsible for early hits such as Surfin’ Safari, and Surfin’ USA; but taking up the mantle of producer, his ambition began to gain significant scope (indeed, Wilson expressed his desire “to redraw the entire map of pop music”), moving away from previous formulae with lyrical tropes of cars and surfing— Wilson in fact had a fear of the ocean. This ambition would see an incredible work rate emerge, with the band creating nine albums between 1963 and 1965.

The production influence of Phil Spector— most famous for his ‘wall of sound’ recording approach— loomed large over Wilson, who later attributed his discovery of the album format’s potential to the decorated producer. “I started to see the point of making records,” he wrote in the liner notes for a 1991 CD version of Pet Sounds. “You design the experience to be a record rather than just a song. It’s the record that people listen to.”

Strident experiments in the studio ensued, which would stretch the boundaries of pop music forever. In 1966, Wilson’s fear of flying led him to stay in Los Angeles while his bandmates continued to tour. Glen Campbell went out as his replacement. Between January and April of that year, Wilson recorded Pet Sounds, the magnum opus of The Beach Boys. Legendary session band the Wrecking Crew was enlisted for the sessions, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Carole Kaye, alongside a host of other, less likely musicians; for instance French horn player Alan Robinson, member of the 20th Century Fox orchestra and who just before had played on the soundtrack to Robert Wise’s The Sound Of Music. Robinson’s horn part at the opening of God Only Knows would become one of the album’s most iconic moments, even if it was consigned to the B-side of Wouldn’t It Be Nice over alleged concerns about the use of the word ‘God’.

Wilson may have garnered a reputation as a shy and retiring presence in public, but by all accounts was a commanding presence in the studio. Producer and Three Dog Night founder Danny Hutton was in the studio during the recording of Pet Sounds, later acknowledging that what he learned from Brian in that period would shape his approach to recorded music in general. “[Brian] would hear something wrong,” he remembered of the session for God Only Knows, “and bam— ‘One more time’. I just sat there and didn’t say a word. I had been in sessions where I thought to myself, ‘They should do this and that’. Not this time. I just shut up. What could I add?”

God Only Knows not only demonstrates Wilson’s mastery of the art of songwriting (he, along with lyricist Tony Asher, wrote the song in 45 minutes), but it also showcases his growing confidence as a producer in 1966. Production value for Wilson could be found in all manner of places, be it ambitious instrumentation, such as the two basses deployed on the track (Lyle Ritz’s upright bass and Ray Pohlman’s bass guitar), or household objects: what sound like reverberant woodblocks in the track are in fact the sounds of two orange plastic cups.

The (unfinished) follow-up to Pet Sounds, SMiLE, would see Wilson’s production approach take even more of a prominent role, with the studio itself being used like an instrument. Recording was purposefully limited to shorter interchangeable passages— referred to as ‘feels’ by Wilson— which could then be spliced and combined together, often using reverb to soften the transitions. Some of these would last mere seconds, others would be characterised by spoken word or sound effects. “I planned to fit them together like a mosaic,” said Wilson of the approach.

Perhaps the best example of this is Good Vibrations, a song that Wilson would later cite as “my whole life performance in one track.” Flowing from section to section, the startlingly conspicuous tape splices on Good Vibrations take more from the craft of musique concrète than they do from careful textbook pop production, where engineers would pride themselves on the near-unnoticeable subtlety of their tape edits.

The song allegedly took six months to create, and its cost is mythologised to have been somewhere between $10,000 and $75,000 (roughly $744,000 in 2025). As with God Only Knows, the choice of instrumentation on Good Vibrations is inspired: the chugging cello under the titular lyric dancing perfectly with the lighthearted wail of vaunted trombonist Paul Tanner playing his own invention, the electro-theremin. Tanner’s design— a spinoff of Leon Theremin’s instrument that enabled easier pitching and volume control— had previously featured in the Pet Sounds cut I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.

Subsequent albums continued to demonstrate Wilson’s genius behind the console: the uncanny reversed reverb on the achingly beautiful Feel Flows from 1971’s Surf’s Up, the ominous world-building of the three-part California Saga from 1973’s Holland.

Wilson’s life outside of the studio was complicated to say the least: mental health troubles, acrimony among the band and a period of coercive control by psychologist Eugene Landy, to name but a few of his struggles. For much of his life, Wilson may have felt, as the lyric goes, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times— but for musicians and producers the world over, his legacy is unquestionably for all time.

RIP Brian Wilson