The 1967 album Brian Wilson claimed was entirely out of tune
There are many ways in which you could describe the music of The Beach Boys, and while jovial, breezy and technicolour all fit the bill as adjectives to sum up the mood of their music, a more accurate label to put on it from a musical perspective is ‘tuneful’.
Never in the band’s history, whether the end result was good or not, did the California band deliver something that sounded monotonous or lacking in melodicism. In fact, this was virtually the main principle that guided the band forward through all different stages of their career, and for it to be absent from anything they released would have felt jarring to say the least.
Yes, there are songs that sound corny as hell in there, and there are some that take on a darker tone, but none of those are devoid of a tune, no matter how grating or morbid the delivery of them may have been. Surf’s Up is an album where the band appeared to divert from the norm and go for something more introspective, and it worked a treat, while the disastrous Summer in Paradise from 1992 still maintains melody, even if it’s a load of guff.
In terms of coming up with tunes, the band were almost in a superabundance thanks to the peerless songwriting ability of their leader, Brian Wilson. Most songwriters can often take ages painstakingly picking out the right melody to use in a song, but for Wilson, it appeared to come to him instinctively, and at a great rate.
If he’d already come up with one melody, Wilson would provide counter-melodies that could be used either in the instrumental backing or in a vocal harmony, meaning that there would be layers of melody that one could ostensibly pick out from their songs.
However, despite having released a masterpiece in Pet Sounds in 1966 and rearranging his magnum opus Smile into Smiley Smile earlier in 1967, Wilson wanted to return to something simpler for the band’s next release, which would squeak out before 1967 had drawn to a close.
For Wild Honey, it was a lot more back to basics in terms of the songwriting, but rather than relying on that innate melodicism, he opted to make one bizarre alteration to the record that gave it a unique sound when compared to the rest of their catalogue.
Writing in his 2016 memoir, he claimed that Wild Honey was a result of wanting to be a rock and roll band again rather than a pop outfit. “I tuned my piano slightly out, more like a 12-string guitar, to get a more mellow sound,” he claimed. “I got the idea to slightly detune from my piano tuner, and I loved what it did to the sound of the record. That album had such good energy, especially on the title song where Carl gave us another great vocal.”
It’s a remarkable shift for the band, and an approach that could easily have backfired for them, considering how much attention they’d accrued for themselves for having gorgeous harmonies. However, the decision to flatten everything somehow worked a treat and consequently helped them make one of the most unusual yet still rewarding albums of their career.
