Robin Pecknold explains the lyrical genius of Brian Wilson: “Inventive and emotive”
The art of songwriting often starts with just a shred of an idea. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the greatest thing in the world starting out, but when any writer starts to flesh everything out and add little pieces to it, what could have been just a simple jingle turns into one of the most accomplished pieces of music that they have ever laid down. Although Brian Wilson understood the complexity of making brilliant melodies, Robin Pecknold knew that a lot of his genius came down to being simple.
Then again, Pecknold’s style of music is normally indebted to keeping things straightforward. Since most singer-songwriters are used to delivering their songs on just an acoustic guitar and piano half the time, that leaves room for people to focus on the intense lyrics if the structure isn’t the main draw.
In fact, the approaches to songwriting for Pecknold and Wilson are almost completely contradictory. Whereas Pecknold’s brand of songwriting lends itself well to muted instrumentation and intense lyrics, The Beach Boys made their living off of typical songs about summertime with massive arrangments around them.
Around the time of Pet Sounds, though, Wilson was reaching to do something much bigger than what everyone else could. The idea of making surf songs until the end of time could have at least been lucrative for a while, but that wasn’t enough to sustain his artistic side, which led to him using The Wrecking Crew as an instrument on his masterpiece.
Even though some songs like ‘God Only Knows’ kept everything heavy, Pecknold thought the genius behind the album was how matter-of-fact he was with his lyrics, saying, “A lyric as straightforward as ‘sometimes I feel very sad’ becomes a universe when set to music as inventive and emotive as Brian’s. I think young musicians gravitate to the art form because music is a better means of communicating emotional realities than language alone can be, closer to the ineffable, unnameable truth of things. And no one has ever gotten closer to that truth than Brian.”
The Beach Boys Today! showed Wilson slowly inching closer to this kind of sound, but this was where Wilson managed to write something as emotionally potent as The Beatles. ‘Surfer Girl’ may have been the basis for what he could do with that format, but writing about concepts like love and emotion and making them feel like universal truths of life is something that everyone has been trying to master since.
Even though only a handful of modern pop acts are trying to directly follow Wilson’s format when it comes to lyrics, it’s easy to spot where his influence has rubbed off. Regardless of what genre they fall into, artists who choose to make songs focused on their muse rather than the bottom line are following in Wilson’s footsteps, whether they know it or not.
Because when you break it down, the only kind of music that will survive isn’t the trendy songs that lasted for one summer. It’ll be the tracks that captured something real in between the speakers, and Wilson always managed to get in touch with reality on vinyl.
