‘Keep An Eye On Summer’: Is Jacob Collier the perfect person to honour Brian Wilson?
Jacob Collier is an opinion splitting figure. Plenty of people won’t have heard of him, but the artist has seven Grammy Awards and has collaborated with the likes of John Mayer, Chris Martin, John Legend and a long list of pop mainstays.
Those people think he’s a genius, and plenty believe he’s a musician solely for musicians, arguing that his technicality is isolating. And doesn’t that arguably make him the best person to honour Brian Wilson?
For a long time, people didn’t give The Beach Boys their flowers. “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Brian for a while,” Paul Simon admitted, initially shrugging him off. “I thought it was lame,” Jackson Browne first said, but so many musicians’ stories about Wilson come back to Browne’s additional point, “I was maybe too young to really appreciate how incredibly sophisticated the music was”.
Each story comes with a turning point. Simon and Garfunkel heard ‘Good Vibrations’ and suddenly had their eyes opened. David Crosby said, “‘In My Room’ was the defining point for me. When I heard it, I thought ‘I give up – I can’t do that – I’ll never be able to do that’” while his bandmate Graham Nash declared, “He was way advanced of what anybody was doing at that point.”
Now, when people talk about Wilson, they rightfully declare him a genius. With time, it’s as if his true position has been unlocked with more and more artists hearing what he was doing in these songs, noticing the technicalities and the limit pushing and realising how powerful he was all along.
I wonder whether Jacob Collier will have the same turn as his new release, ‘Keep An Eye On Summer’, sees him reimagine a Beach Boys deep cut in a way that captures the same tricky ingenuity.
The band’s original was a very classic sun-stroked 1964 track for them. It’s harmony heavy, hyper-notalgic and doo-wop-y. It’s vanilla but it’s still beautiful. It optimises early opinions of the band as, on the surface, this sounds like it’s just a nice radio-ready song, but when you start to unpick the layers, the specifics of how those harmonies are layered or Wilson’s decisions for the melody, it becomes a bigger beast.
For his version, Collier simultaneously strips it back and also levels it up. With no band for the harmonies, he instead builds them on guitar somehow, playing two custom instruments; a five string and a 10 string. Immediately, that’s insane. What do you mean a five string guitar? Or a 10 string? What scales are we working on there? What chords are going on?
Those are questions Wilson would’ve asked and been fascinated by. With his own obsession with studio advancements and playing with limits, there’s a sense that Wilson would have loved to sit and watch Collier at work. While critics have always claimed that Collier’s obsessive technicality and boundary pushing always comes back to musical theory or more educated choices that the average listener couldn’t grasp, claiming that those things make him inaccessible or not as enjoyable – a point I do tend to agree with – they’re also the things that draw a perfect tie between himself and Wilson; two artists isolated by their own fixations.
Maybe we’ll see a swing in favour. Down the line, perhaps people would come out in their droves to praise Collier to no end and grant him misunderstood genius status. From a listener’s perspective, I hope to see a swing in Collier going full Beach Boys, applying his technicality to making more approachable pop songs with notes taken from Wilson’s ability to write a hook. On ‘Keep An Eye On Summer’, he proves he has the beauty with this deeply beautiful and approachable cover, so let’s see about the rest.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.