The most beautiful song Brian Wilson ever wrote arrived in 1964: “One of the prettiest”
There aren’t many pieces of the pop world that Brian Wilson didn’t help invent in some way.
Even though there are plenty of years in between the modern age of pop stars and the days of writing surf songs about going out with your girlfriend, there isn’t a single producer of pop today that isn’t still living inside the halls that Wilson built with his bare hands on a lot of his best work. He was looking to make musical art in lots of ways, but he was always a sucker for a great melody whenever it came up.
And when combing through a lot of The Beach Boys’ early tunes, Wilson already knew his way around a good melody. Those early surfing songs still had solid enough hooks even in their primitive state, but Wilson always wanted the chance to stretch things out. He didn’t want to be identified with writing party songs for the rest of his life, but it was going to take him a while before he was ready for Pet Sounds.
Granted, it’s not like Mike Love made it any easier when he was talking about not screwing with the formula from time to time in the studio. He knew what all of those tunes needed to be hits, but there’s a difference between making something that people want to hear and doing another version of ‘Be True to Your School’ for the 16th time in a row. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t get serious back in the day, either.
‘Surfer Girl’ was already one of their greatest ballads when they were still making standard pop music, but everything was bound to come to a standstill when President Kennedy passed away. No one had seen something so horrific happen to one of the leaders of the country in decades, and since it was known to bring sunshine to every situation, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ was the first time that he tried his hand at writing a song about something heavy.
Anything that covered the death of president had to be handled with kids gloves, but Wilson was more than up to the challenge. A lot of the song is about trying to find some sort of solace in tragedy, and while he had only just begun writing timeless music, Wilson felt that he had hit on something that sounded so much more beautiful than what he had been holding himself to for all of those years.
It was unfortunate that it took the death of Kennedy for him to get there, but he felt that ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ was among one of the finest ballads that he ever wrote, saying, “[That’s] probably Mike Love’s most beautiful lyrics he’s ever written and one of the prettiest songs I ever wrote. I think it’s because JFK had died the day before. We dedicated it to him and I tried to sing it sweetly and angelically, you know, trying to capture the sound of a sweet angel.”
But if Wilson needed something else to kick him back into high gear, he didn’t yet realise what was going on half a world away. The Beatles were already hard at work making their second album by this point, and when they crash-landed on American soil only a few months later, Wilson was so jealous that he wanted to find something that could manage to compete with what they did.
The historians of the world can still talk about how Rubber Soul was what kicked Wilson into gear, but ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ has a much better case of being one of his true masterpieces. No one would have thought that he had a song like this in him, but after going through such a tragedy, Wilson was there to remind everyone that pop music could still be sombre and introspective when it wanted to be.
