“He was there to teach me”: The artist that shaped Brian Wilson’s mind
When people consider the greatest producers of all time, many will turn their heads in the direction of Brian Wilson for his remarkable technicolour visions of how pop music should sound. While his catalogue isn’t quite as deep as some of the other candidates who are often also touted as the greats, the ambition shown on Beach Boys albums like Pet Sounds and Surf’s Up is remarkable and shows a great aptitude for understanding how different studio techniques and arrangements could bring his elaborate compositions to life.
When compared to other notable producers such as Quincy Jones, Brian Eno, or Nile Rodgers, little outside of his contributions to his own band or solo career showcases his brilliance. However, the comparatively small number of records he did work on as a producer were groundbreaking in ways that shaped much of what would come afterwards.
Wilson’s greatest works were always praised for the clarity between instruments and for how vibrant everything managed to sound in the recordings. Everything had space to shine and room to breathe plenty of life into the best Beach Boys songs, and even the cuts from forgotten albums of the band are produced in a way that feels intentionally focused on providing equal weight to the contributions of every musician in the room.
His influence on modern music can’t be understated, as artists continue to emerge while citing him as an important touchstone for how they make their own records, with acts like Animal Collective and Fleet Foxes being vocal fans of the work of Brian Wilson. However, Wilson’s influences must have emerged from somewhere, and one person whose work is often credited as having had a major impact on the way that Wilson approached the craft of producing records is Phil Spector.
Celebrated for his pioneering ‘Wall of Sound’ recording technique, Spector was best known for recording several girl groups throughout the 1960s, such as The Ronettes, The Crystals and The Paris Sisters, before going on to work with the likes of John Lennon, George Harrison and Leonard Cohen later in his career. Utilising a group of accomplished musicians dubbed The Wrecking Crew, Spector achieved his ‘Wall of Sound’ by combining dense orchestral layers to generate a maximalist sound that was uncommon for pop records at the time, and this was something that inspired Wilson hugely throughout his career.
Speaking about the creation of the Pet Sounds instrumental track ‘Let’s Go Away For A While’, Wilson noted that while he had been significantly inspired by the songwriting of Burt Bacharach for the song itself, it was the work of Spector that had the most profound effect on the sound of the song. Wilson said that something Spector would often employ in his practice was that “he knew in his head what he wanted before he got to the studio” and that this was something he himself wished to achieve.
The two had met before in the past, with Wilson further elaborating that Spector had invited him down to Gold Star Studios on multiple occasions. “I think he really wanted to teach me a little bit about production,” said Wilson. “I didn’t know that at the time because I was just a young, naïve little guy. But later on I realized he was there to help me, and he was there to teach me about something.”
With the Wrecking Crew also present on the track and throughout the rest of the recordings on Pet Sounds, there are several traces of Spector’s influence on what Wilson and the Beach Boys were trying to achieve at the time, but what Wilson managed to do was place his own creative fingerprints and identity on it, making every element of the his compositions feel far bolder.
