The Genesis song inspired by The Beach Boys
Great artists know how to search in strange places to find inspiration. Imagine being a shoegaze artist who just listened to shoegaze or a jazz musician who refused to acknowledge any kind of music other than jazz. That would be a pretty boring existence, wouldn’t it? Progressive rock musicians need to keep their ears open in order to find new avenues to explore and one of the best examples of a band that embraced that philosophy was Genesis.
After Peter Gabriel left the band following the tour in support of their 1974 album The Land Lies Down on Broadway, the remaining members of the band attempted to replicate Gabriel’s British music hall weirdness for a few albums before deciding to try on a new style. When the membership of the band was whittled down to three, Genesis decided to embrace a poppier and more mainstream style of music that catapulted them to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world.
By staying in tune with modern trends, Genesis was able to not only evolve and adapt but thrive in changing musical times. But it wasn’t always about looking forward. On certain occasions, Phil Collins would revisit the past in order to gain some inspiration. While appearing on the BBC radio programme ‘Tracks of My Years’, Collins pointed to an old-school classic that helped form the basis for one of Genesis’ earliest pop hits in the early 1980s.
“One forgets about The Beach Boys sometimes, the amount of great songs that Brian Wilson wrote, you know,” Collins claimed on the programme. “But this album Holland, that this song comes from has got a lot of good songs on it. It appeared when they were unhip, you know.”
“It was on one of their quieter eras. But ‘Sail on Sailor’ had such a fantastic groove that I wrote ‘Misunderstanding’, which Genesis did,” Collins claimed. “I would have done it on my solo album, but Genesis chose it. I wrote that because I love the groove of this. So it’s my nod to The Beach Boys. But it’s just a great melody and great feel.”
The piano-heavy drive of ‘Sail On, Sailor’ certainly bears a passing resemblance to ‘Misunderstanding’, specifically the triplet-heavy push and pull that sits at the centre of both songs’ arrangements. The early 1970s was a particularly low point for The Beach Boys, and new blood was brought in to try and revitalise the group. ‘Sail On, Sailor’ was one of the few tracks sung by Blondie Chaplin, whose tenure in the band lasted just two years.
Check out both ‘Sail On, Sailor’ and ‘Misunderstanding’ down below.
