The Beach Boys song that shaped Jessica Pratt’s songwriting
If we’re talking about the most influential and important acts to have ever existed, then there aren’t many whose impact can still be felt to this day to the same extent as that of The Beach Boys.
First of all, the magnitude of the songwriting is one element that puts the group above many of their contemporaries, with primary writer Brian Wilson having developed a knack for making the most extravagant and luscious compositions seem like child’s play. As influential as they may have been in this regard, few have been able to live up to the high benchmark that the California group laid down during the 1960s, which only goes to illustrate just how far ahead they stand of the competition.
While it’s easy for other artists to write songs that vaguely sound like The Beach Boys from a compositional perspective, it’s their use of vocal harmonies that have been copied far more frequently, with three, four and even five-part harmonies sometimes sitting over the top of Wilson’s already complex songs. This might seem like an unnecessary and overly-complicated layering of elements, but it was very rare that the band ever released something where their use of harmony felt superfluous.
On top of this, the production styles and techniques that Wilson employed, while inspired by the likes of George Martin and Phil Spector, are still utilised to this day, and despite being almost 60 years old, they hold up in today’s world due to how they’ve barely seemed to age or show any sign of becoming outdated.
For all of the band and Wilson’s achievements in these aspects, what doesn’t get talked about so often is the lyrics, which are often overlooked or dismissed as having been trite or contrived. While some of their songs can be accused of only delivering surface level observations on love, relationships and thinking about the good times, there are plenty of occasions where Wilson has found himself in a much more introspective mood, where he’s chosen to dive into heavier topics.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who look up to The Beach Boys in this regard, though, and one modern artist who believes there’s a considerable amount more weight to their lyrics than most would presume is Jessica Pratt; someone whose own lyrics have been praised for their combination of dry humour, introspective exploration of emotions, and their simplistic beauty.
It’s understandable that Pratt is a fan of their work, but the way in which she incorporates their influence comes across in a totally different way than how one might expect, with the atmosphere of her songs often being a lot more sparse than the busy and buoyant arrangements that Wilson came up with. However, it’s the lyrics that she looks at as being the main way in which they inspired her, and she cites their 1964 song, ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, as being one of their finest examples.
“It’s a combination of an incongruent feeling with the sound of the music and the sound of the words,” Pratt claimed during a 2024 interview with Paste. “There’s a bit of a conflict there, where, maybe, the words are heavier than they seem. It’s that weird thing where it’s like, ‘Okay, in one verse he’s singing about a car. In another verse, he’s laying down these fundamental truths about love and connection and loss.’”
It’s a truly sublime song, and one from their early period that tends to get overlooked, but given how it so plainly touches on such a universally understandable feeling and allows the music to envelop it is masterful, and you can understand why this has had such a profound effect on a modern writer such as Pratt.
