The 1967 Beach Boys song inspired by Stevie Wonder and a health food store: “Each feel represented a mood”
The foundational lineup of The Beach Boys comprised the Wilson brothers – Brian, Dennis, and Carl – alongside their cousin Mike Love and close friend Al Jardine. This tight familial and fraternal bond imbued the band’s music with a unique harmony that resonated with audiences worldwide throughout their 1960s heyday and beyond.
The Beach Boys rose from humble beginnings as an early surf-rock proponent to become a pivotal countercultural force thanks to Brian Wilson’s famous knack for compositional innovation and symphonious vocal harmonies. The band reached its zenith in 1966 with the arrival of Pet Sounds, their masterpiece album that presented The Beatles with a worthy opponent in the race for pop-rock royalty.
“I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called ‘feels’,” Brian Wilson recalled of the album in his memoir Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story. “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.”
Flowing with an optimistic grace and an embrace of love, especially in the famous singles ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’, the album became an early classic of the psychedelic rock movement and resonated deeply with the hippie generation as they stood at odds with the American war in Vietnam.
Although they never managed to return to the dizzying heights of Pet Sounds, they remained prolific throughout the remainder of the 1960s. In 1967, The Beach Boys followed Pet Sounds with two albums in quick succession: September’s Smiley Smile and December’s Wild Honey.
As the names suggest, the albums heard a continuation of the band’s associative sound of heady summers and surfing hippies. Wild Honey presented this tone with a back-to-basics compositional approach, led by the psychedelic, key-driven eponymous lead single.
At this stage in their career, The Beach Boys were actively recalibrating their identity. Moving away from the intricate, studio-heavy ambition of Pet Sounds and the abandoned Smile project, they embraced a looser, more immediate sound. This shift wasn’t just stylistic, it reflected a band trying to reconnect with spontaneity, favouring feel and groove over perfectionism.
That creative pivot also opened the door for more collaborative input within the group. While Brian Wilson had previously dominated the band’s direction, Wild Honey saw other members stepping forward with ideas and influences, helping to shape a record that felt more communal. It’s within that environment that a track like ‘Wild Honey’ could emerge organically, sparked as much by everyday moments as by deliberate artistic intent.
Some fans suggest that the album and song inspired Paul McCartney to write ‘Wild Honey Pie’ for The Beatles’ 1968 self-titled album. Whether or not that’s true, The Beach Boys’ song was inspired by Stevie Wonder and Bian Wilson’s concurrent obsession with healthy foods.
During a 2012 interview with Billboard, the lyricist Mike Love remembered that ‘Wild Honey’ was conceived while the band recorded ‘Darlin’ at Brian’s home in Bel Air. He ventured into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and saw a healthy food product that immediately inspired him.
“Brian had a health food store back then called the Radiant Radish,” Love recalled, “And I look up and see ‘wild honey’, and the track is pumping, and I thought, ‘I’ll make up a song called ‘Wild Honey’.”
Curiously, Love had the up-and-coming R&B star Stevie Wonder on his mind at the time. “So I said, I’ll write the lyrics about this girl who was a wild little honey,” Love added in another conversation with Goldmine. “And I wrote it from the perspective that that album was Brian’s R&B-influenced album, in his mind. It may not sound like it to a Motown executive, but that was where he was coming from on that record. In that particular instance, I wrote it from the perspective of Stevie Wonder singing it.”
“What would Stevie Wonder say to his mother about a girl that maybe she didn’t want him to get involved with? – but he says, ‘Screw it’ – he really digs this chick,” Love elaborated. “That was the premise of the song.”
Listen to The Beach Boys’ ‘Wild Honey’ below.
