The 1970s singer Brian Wilson could never match: “The opposite”
There aren’t many musicians who could claim to be as gifted as Brian Wilson was with The Beach Boys.
Even though he wasn’t always the best lyricist in the world, the fact that he could bring together some of the brightest melodies of all time is the reason why pop music sounds the way it does to this day. A lot of the greatest pop producers are still using his playbook every time they sit down to write a hit, but even with a genius-level of musicality, Wilson was one of the few people in the world claiming that he wasn’t exactly capable of everything when he got behind the piano.
He was certainly proud to have written some of the best songs that The Beach Boys ever made, but Wilson was often one of the most humble men in the music industry. He always maintained that his music came from the heart before anything else, and he wasn’t going to claim that he had any ownership of what he was doing. Besides, it took every other member of the band to help bring those songs to life.
Sure, Mike Love might like to take a bit too much credit for the band’s legacy every now and again, but when you look at the other brothers, Brian wasn’t the only one making magic happen. Dennis Wilson was the one bringing a tiny bit of grit to every one of their songs whenever he busted out his singing chops, and as much as ‘God Only Knows’ is one of the most perfect love songs ever created, Carl Wilson had that certain angelic voice that made more sense to deliver that kind of tune.
In fact, that’s probably what made Brian a bit self-conscious whenever he was singing. He was the one with that soaring falsetto every single time he sang, and while that was the perfect sound for them whenever he hit on tunes like ‘California Girls’ or those massive harmonies on ‘I Get Around’, Wilson was the one complaining that his songs didn’t really have as much grit to them as they probably should have.
When looking at the biggest storytellers in the world, Wilson felt that there was no way that could have held a candle to the kind of songs that someone like Kenny Rogers was singing, saying, “I was able to close my eyes and go into a world and sing a little more effeminately and more sweet – which allows a lot more love to come down through me, you know what I mean?… It’s like Kenny Rogers. There’s an example of a guy who has a fairly masculine-sounding voice. [A song like] ‘You Still Believe In Me’ was quite the opposite.”
But would Rogers’s voice have really helped any of those Beach Boys classics? There are definitely moments in their catalogue that could have benefited from having a bit more punch behind them, but even when looking through some of their most breathtaking ballads, making songs that sounded like they were soaring above the clouds was often the right approach for tunes like ‘Caroline No’.
I mean, think about it for a second. Wilson already hated listening to someone like Johnny Cash because of how low his voice was, so making an entire album based on the lower side of his register was never going to work. It would have been interesting for a song or two, but asking Wilson not to use that beautiful falsetto would have been like telling Eddie Van Halen to tone down his solos or asking Jimi Hendrix if he would kindly not use any of his effects whenever he played.
Those elements are part of the excitement behind many of these classic artists, and if Wilson excelled in that one field, why the hell would he want to switch things up just for the hell of it? There were bound to be a few country artists that gravitated towards Wilson’s arrangements every now and again, but Rogers had a far more distinct sound that didn’t need to be given the fun-in-the-sun treatment.
