“I wanted to grow musically, so I experimented. At the end, he still circles back to being proudest of Pet Sounds. Wilson also reflects on various health challenges, including the deafness in his right ear and his ongoing battle with symptoms of schizoaffective disorder. The conversation ranges from the unique pros and cons of a family-band relationship to the lessons Wilson has learned from the various lyricists with whom he’s collaborated over a decades-long career. Life’s Work: An Interview with Brian Wilson (Alison Beard, Harvard Business Review, December 2016)Īs part of the HBR’s “Life’s Work” interview series, Beard talked with Wilson to commemorate the release of his autobiography I Am Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson’s falsetto was but one part of the band’s vocal blend every member was needed to unlock the potential of their collective sound. The very core of their sound was built upon complex harmonies that required a great deal of coordination and mutual understanding. ![]() ![]() The Beach Boys were always a vocal group at heart, a rock ’n’ roll choir. He not only provides context for many of the band’s best-known and least-known works (“Caroline, No” from Pet Sounds, was released on Capitol Records under “Brian Wilson” rather than “The Beach Boys”) but also assesses the often distorting effect that the cumulative story has on our impressions of Wilson versus the rest of the family. Wong, occasioned by the release of the 2021 documentary Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, parses the myth shrouding the bandmates’ creative partnership, of which he feels Wilson is generally assigned too large a percentage. With the artist’s 80th birthday approaching in June, here is a sampling of such reflections.īrian Wilson Isn’t the Type of Genius You Think He Is (Grant Wong, Slate, January 2022) That people have not stopped generating literature and ancillary art in response to Wilson and his masterstroke speaks to the sustained relevance of his contributions to pop music and its environs. It turns out almost everybody has an opinion on Wilson’s supposed genius, or on Pet Sounds as evidence of it, or both. And the more I learned about how much there was left to learn, the more worthwhile the whole undertaking became.Įven after wrapping the season, I keep happening upon more writing. What I unearthed over the course of that first season gave me the sense, as a good education does, that there was more to know than I could ever learn. Confident as I was in my ability to perform a season’s worth of compositional and lyrical analysis, I knew I would need to research to fill in my understanding of the band’s peculiar dynamic and of its mixed-up maestro, Brian Wilson, with whom Pet Sounds is synonymous. And the pandemic had supplied me with the time and energy to create the kind of podcast I’d spent the last couple of years fantasizing about. But the album was a fixture in my life before then - watching the film, I realized I could sing every note, vocal and instrumental. At my family’s vehement recommendation, I’d just seen the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy, part of which mythologizes the album’s genesis I was also listening to the album itself a lot, because I’ve done that since becoming a Serious Music Critic at age 13, specifically a Serious Critic of Any Music Tangential to the Beatles. In the dregs of the dismal winter of 2021, approaching the anniversary of the first COVID lockdown, I had the idea to start a podcast about Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ belatedly acclaimed 1966 orchestral-pop record. ![]() Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |