One Beach Boys song inspired Graham Nash to greatness: “Brian is just a genius”
In the late 1960s, the rock sphere was still dominated by vocal harmonies. While The Rolling Stones made the most of their sour approach to vocal arrangement on their best tracks, the long-standing legacy that The Beatles had meant that everyone had to at least know how to blend with each other when they sang different parts together.
Graham Nash may have learned how to make the mathematically perfect arrangements every time he worked with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but it wasn’t until hearing The Beach Boys song ‘God Only Knows’ that he had a direction.
When looking at where Nash started in The Hollies, though, he had already had a good idea of how to lay harmonies on top of each other. He had been playing the same clubs that the Fab Four had in the early part of their career, and no amount of rock and roll credentials could be better than having to teach John Lennon how to sing the soul classic ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ before he cut the album Please Please Me.
But if The Beatles were the British equivalent of a rock institution, Brian Wilson had created a rock and roll hit factory with The Beach Boys. For all of the tunes about young love that Lennon and McCartney spit out, Wilson could write about everything from love to cars to surfing up and down the coast, but there was one thing missing.
There hadn’t been nearly enough heart in Wilson’s music, and if anyone plays songs that don’t have a singular emotion in them, chances are they would probably rather take a hatchet to their fingers instead of having to go over to the piano one more time. What Wilson did had to be from the heart, and Nash thought he hit perfection with Pet Sounds.
That’s where ‘God Only Knows’ feels like a genuine turning point, not just for Wilson but for anyone paying close enough attention. Up until that moment, pop had flirted with sincerity, but rarely had it sounded this exposed, this willing to put everything on the line for the sake of a feeling that couldn’t be dressed up any other way.
For Nash, hearing that kind of emotional clarity must have felt like a door swinging open. The mechanics of harmony were already second nature to him, but this was something different altogether, a lesson in how those voices could serve something deeper than just a pleasing sound. It wasn’t about stacking parts neatly anymore; it was about chasing a feeling and letting the arrangement follow.
From that point on, you can hear that shift ripple through everything he touched. The harmonies didn’t just lock in, they breathed, carrying a sense of vulnerability that owed as much to Wilson’s blueprint as it did to Nash’s own instincts, turning those carefully constructed vocal lines into something that felt human rather than merely perfect.
While the entire album is a masterpiece from start to finish, ‘God Only Knows’ exists in this strange space on the record. There had been introspective tunes before this, like ‘That’s Not Me’ and later on ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’, but listening to Wilson sing about the basic need to be loved in return is one of the most innocently beautiful statements in rock history.
That kind of simplicity wasn’t lost on Nash, either, saying, “This is one of the best songs that was ever written. It’s one of the best records that was ever made. Brian Wilson is a genius. That particular song just touched my heart. Carl is singing beautifully on it. I always felt like we had similar kinds of voices. But Brian is just a genius.”
And looking at the way that Crosby, Stills, and Nash laid their vocals on top of each other, it’s hard not to see a few of Wilson’s fingerprints on them. The entire mentality behind a track like ‘Teach Your Children’ or their cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ may have been all their own, but when listening to where all the voices rest, it’s practically the same as ‘You Still Believe In Me’.
But by no means was Nash trying to imitate what Wilson was trying to do. That kind of genius is only reserved for one person every generation, and when they are found out in the wild, all the rest of us can do is learn from them or look on in amazement.
