The most profound influence of Brian Wilson’s life: “Definitely proud”
Brian Wilson‘s legacy in music is cemented by the sheer number of artists who have cited him as an influence.
While The Beatles are often credited with drenching the landscape of popular music in a vibrant brand of technicolour, it was Wilson who handed them the paint brushes. Quietly assessing the landscape of pop music in the early 1960s, Wilson crafted a catalogue of songs that inoffensively fit the mould. But then, in 1966, he commandeered the wheel and lifted music into the stratosphere with his dreamy brand of experimental music on Pet Sounds.
“The big influence was Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys,” Paul McCartney once explained in reference to The Beatles’ major sonic shift.
He continued, “That was the album that flipped me. The musical invention on that album was, like, ‘Wow!’ That was the big thing for me. I just thought, ‘Oh dear me. This is the album of all time. What the hell are we going to do?’ So, Sgt Pepper eventually came out, basically, from the idea that I had about this band. It was going to be an album of another band that wasn’t us.”
The influence of that record simply cannot be understated. It extends far beyond the immediate impact on The Beatles and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and can instead be traced in the identity of modern pop. So for many who study music culture, history is separated into two parts. The time that came before Pet Sounds, and the time that exists after.
But it would be foolish to wholeheartedly buy into that vision. While Wilson’s baby was an advent of pure genius, it’s misguided to believe it’s rooted solely in originality and not taken from anything that existed before.
In fact, Wilson was keen to debunk any such claims and deliberately cited the work of one man as deeply influential in the composition of Pet Sounds. When talking about ‘Let’s Go Away For A While’ specifically.
Wilson explained, “If you want to know the truth, I think Burt Bacharach had influenced me a little bit with that. If you really analyse it and you think about it, there were a lot of chord changes similar to the way he would put something together. And I think that his music had such a profound thing on my head; he got me going in a direction. I’m definitely proud of that tune.”
He continued, placing Bacharach’s name alongside a classical great, to highlight just how complex his influences were, in creating a new age pop masterpiece, “We used kettle drums toward the end of the song, where it goes (sings). We used dynamics like Beethoven. You know, Beethoven, the dynamic music maker.”
While we can’t outrightly credit Wilson for inventing pop music altogether, for the lineage of his influence has been made clear, we can still laud his genius and its ability to stitch together eras. It wasn’t until his work with Pet Sounds that modern pop realised it could interact with the likes of Beethoven in such an interesting and contemporary way.
