The songwriter Brian Wilson counted among the greatest: “With the best of them”
Anything that Brian Wilson ever made seemed to be touched by some divine musical God.
While Wilson always claimed that he couldn’t take credit for some of the greatest tunes that he ever worked on, there’s a certain magic that comes with listening to the opening of ‘California Girls’ or how every single voice works off of each other perfectly in ‘Good Vibrations’. But even if all the extensions and harmonies sound beautiful, Wilson felt that some of the greatest songs don’t need to have a lot of window dressing to sound perfect.
I mean, look at the way that The Beach Boys started out. A lot of their first songs are fairly primitive by their later standards, but you can still feel that kind of excitement in their voice when singing their first singles like ‘Surfin’. The important thing was being able to capture a feeling whenever someone sang, and Wilson was the master of that whenever he started working on songs for Pet Sounds.
Every one of those tunes captured the feelings that everyone feels as an adolescent, and while ‘God Only Knows’ is still one of the greatest love songs of all time, Wilson was still interested in how the music was making him feel rather than telling a linear story. He was no Bob Dylan when he was writing some of his masterpieces, but Wilson could still appreciate songwriters who took the listener on a journey every single time they stepped up to the microphone.
Story-style songs weren’t always as prevalent in The Beach Boys’ catalogue, but Wilson wasn’t shy about heaping praise on his friends like The Beatles for writing story songs. Rubber Soul had beautiful tales about what adult relationships were supposed to be like, and while Wilson was still stuck talking about teenage angst, he was knocked out when he reached the 1970s and heard Don McLean singing for the first time.
McLean wasn’t the most versatile singer in the world or anything, but ‘American Pie’ is enough for him to be immortalised in music history forever. The details of the history of rock and roll that he crams into every single line is still one of the more profound commentaries that anyone has ever made, and compared to every other hard rock act like Led Zeppelin rising to prominence around that time, Wilson had much more time for McLean whenever he made a tune.
There were other legends like Elton John getting born every single day, but Wilson was just as interested in seeing where someone like McLean was headed all the time, saying, “He’s up there with the best of them. He’s a very talented singer and songwriter, and he deserves all of his success. I respect him very much as a composer. I think he’s very talented and very gifted for being able to create that kind of music.”
But a lot of what makes McLean so fascinating is how he used the principles that Wilson did whenever it came to crafting his lyrics. ‘American Pie’ is shrouded in metaphors from one line to the next, and even if he doesn’t outright call out people like Buddy Holly in the song at any point, he keeps things just transparent enough for people to appreciate the sentiment every single time he plays the chorus.
Wilson was by far the more talented tunesmith compared to McLean, but the folk rock icon wasn’t looking to compete with anyone, either. He was trying to write the best songs that he could during his time in the limelight, and there are hardly any other composers who have managed to have their songs as steeped into rock and roll history as much as he has over the years.
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