“Very spiritual”: how the first song Brian Wilson ever wrote became a hit
Music is never supposed to be a job for any seasoned pro. The entire concept of being a musician is to translate the kind of motions that most of us either keep repressed or aren’t quite sure of half the time, so when that one melody grabs you out of the blue, it feels like someone actually understands you for the first time. It might take a lot of experience for someone to hit on something so pure, but Brian Wilson already had that spiritual aspect of music inside him from the very beginning.
But looking at Wilson’s track record with The Beach Boys, there aren’t many tunes that don’t have that kind of spiritual bent to them. There were obviously a handful of them that were meant as cheap cashgbrabs once the songs about cars and girls started taking off, but whereas The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had their fair share of workhorse songs, something about Wilson’s voice made him seem on the verge of tears every time he reached up into his falsetto range.
And that’s really something that the rest of the band could fake their way through when Wilson left the fold. Every member of the band were responsible for making songs like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘God Only Knows’ work, but the minute that they gave the reins to people like Mike Love in the 1990s, it was about the time that everyone realised that they were going to be taking a massive dip in quality.
While it’s easy to make fun of Love for writing cheap tunes about surf-adjacent things, Brian was looking for something different. On every line of Pet Sounds, he had been searching for the meaning of love, and even if it wasn’t the easiest question to answer, he found a way to put that kind of infatuation into musical form when he started singing tunes like ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’.
“The first song I ever wrote. I started humming it in my car, then finished it when I got home.”
Brian Wilson
Then again, those songs don’t always come in one gulp. Brian was always interested in making love songs, and while a tune like ‘She Knows Me Too Well’ was a step in the right direction, everything truly got started with ‘Surfer Girl’. There had been uptempo tunes before, but this kind of waltz is the cutesy tune that could be played in the middle of a school gymnasium circa 1956, while having harmony that sounds like a church hymn.
According to Wilson, though, that kind of religious aspect behind the record wasn’t necessarily an accident, saying, “The first song I ever wrote. I started humming it in my car, then finished it when I got home. It’s a very spiritual song.” Certainly not bad for a kid’s first try, but there’s a running thread from this song to everything else Wilson would be writing for the next few decades.
Whether with or without his band, Brian would always be searching for this kind of love song whenever he sat at the piano. There would be many tracks that called back to the surfing aspect of this song, but as far as Brian was concerned, it was all about the romance in the middle of the tune and how that romance made other people feel whenever they heard it on the radio.
If you were to ask him where it comes from, though, Brian would probably be the last person to say that it has to do with intense musical study. It’s not going to hurt to know the ins and outs of what music could do, but listening back to the way that he wrote music, it seemed to channel from his heart before his brain half the time.
