The 1970 song Brian Wilson never wanted to play again: “Keep it off the set”
Everything that Brian Wilson ever wrote needed to come from the heart before anything else.
He loved the idea of making pop songs whenever he got behind the keyboard, but if it wasn’t stirring something inside him whenever he wrote something, it was best to throw it out and come up with something better next time. He knew that a song wasn’t going to work unless it could make people smile, but some of those heartfelt songs may have been a bit too heartfelt when going back through their catalogue.
Because when you look through every one of Wilson’s songs, not everyone was willing to be as vulnerable as he was whenever he made a record. The fact that he could say ‘I love you’ to his wife midway through a song or have the audacity to use the word ‘God’ in one of his tunes was already taboo at the time, but you’d have to be a fool to think that he was trying to be controversial when listening to his songs.
All of his tunes were meant to lift people’s spirits, and Pet Sounds is the kind of record that still sounds as good as it did when it was released because it was so pure. No one would have imagined that someone could have made such a bold musical statement all by themselves, but even if The Wrecking Crew did a lot of heavy lifting, it’s not like Brian was the only person willing to write songs for the group.
Although Mike Love did what he does best and behaved like a dick trying to get credit on some of the songs he wrote, you can’t deny that he made some great tunes for the band as well. His verses on ‘Good Vibrations’ are the reason why the song works so well, but if you’re looking at the band as a whole, Brian’s brothers were sorely neglected when looking at their prowess as songwriters.
Carl Wilson had the voice of an angel whenever he sang, and when he delivered his own tunes, he could make the occasional track that had a bit more grit behind it. And while Dennis Wilson did have the short end of the stick a lot of the time for having the most gravelly voice in the group, he could still deliver a stunner when he wrote ‘Forever’. That kind of song staggered Brian when he first heard it, but ever since Dennis’s passing, he’s not exactly itching to go back to the song again.
It’s nice for him to get sentimental about his brother, but he didn’t want to play the song ever again because the pain was still too raw, saying, “That’s a song that brings back bad memories. I don’t listen to it very often. I try to keep it off the set on our tour. We got a really tight harmony sound and it brings back a real memory.” But coming from Dennis, this is one of the best love songs that he ever wrote.
While he never got to see a proper solo album come out, Dennis was the unsung hero of the band in a lot of respects, but it makes sense why Brian wouldn’t want to return to the song. The song is still a beautiful ode to Dennis’s significant other, but since many of the lyrics of the song are about him going away, it’s hard for anyone to sing that song without thinking about the fact that he isn’t here anymore.
And despite Love giving the song away to John Stamos to sing the song during the band’s late 1980s period, there’s always going to be the lingering ghost of Dennis every time someone sings the song. He wasn’t the most prolific member of the band by any means, but when looking at Brian’s catalogue, this is the one time where his brother got to harness that same kind of musical magic.
