Brian Wilson’s favourite song by The Beach Boys: “I just like the melody”
Few acts have as much of a chokehold over one particular music style as The Beach Boys do with vocal harmonies. Pushing the boundaries of using vocals as a layered instrument, Brian Wilson led The Beach Boys into a new territory of studio experimentation. He forged a blueprint for future artists to follow.
Their 1966 album Pet Sounds stood out as a body of experimental studio work during a decade where every corner of innovation was being pushed. While The Beatles dominated the chart positions of the entire decade and are credited with changing the musicians’ approach to studio albums with 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it was The Beach Boys who laid the foundation. The Beatles’ iconic producer George Martin once conceded, “Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn’t have happened”.
He continued, “Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds.”
The record boasts some of the band’s most recognisable hits, ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ have gone on to achieve cult success for their craftsman-like approach to melodic composition and instrumental layering.
The recording process was detailed and, at times, painstaking, with the label spending approximately $500,000 on the record. Wilson would reportedly abandon sessions if they weren’t at his required level. It was a far cry from the sun-kissed pop fit for Californian beaches that danced to simple singalong melodies.
Naturally, such an exhaustive approach to studio recording almost broke the band and saw them fall out of commercial favour in the years that followed. They’d built a yardstick of melodic experimentation by which their future records would always be compared. The days of following their natural instincts at an instrument were seemingly gone.
But it was a song in the album Wild Honey from the following year, 1967, that Wilson looks fondly back at as one of his favourites from The Beach Boys.
In a 2015 interview with American Songwriter, he said, “I like a song called ‘Darlin’.”
He added, “I just like the melody.”
This is a somewhat innocent take on a song within a discography of intricacy. After all, the bedrock of the Pet Sounds soundscape was melody and how it could be dressed up in numerous outfits.
But ‘Darlin’’ was an undressed version of that formula. A song with a consistent percussive section and deeply soulful melody, it felt like The Beach Boys’ early signature had been picked up and placed in a groovier 1970s. Speaking of the track, Wilson told Goldmine in 2011: “I was writing more in a soul/R&B bag. The horns were conceived as a Phil Spector kind of a horn thing.”
It has a sort of enate simplicity to it that most feel-good songs have, and ultimately, this is what marks it as such a stark follow-up to Pet Sounds. But for Wilson, it is that lack of painstaking over-analysis that endears the song to his heart and reminds him of the essence of pure songwriting:
“I go to the studio and sit down at the piano and play chords,” he said. “Whatever I feel like playing, you know? And then a melody starts to happen, and then the lyrics start to happen, and then you’ve got a song,” he said in explanation of his process.
While Pet Sounds sits high at the top of our favourite records, for Wilson and the band, it became somewhat of an albatross around their neck. Instead, ‘Darlin’ feels like a song sung around a piano at a party, very much on the fly and ready-made to incite a smiling chorus of vocalists. Brian Wilson can now sit as a willing participant rather than a tortured genius steering the ship.
