The singer Brian Wilson called one of the best in the business
If there was one thing Brian Wilson was put on this Earth to do, it was write music.
Although he had a brilliant voice and could arrange some of the finest harmonies anyone could ever come up with, the magic he possessed whenever he followed his heart is the kind of ability most people spend years trying to have. But when it came to the best songs that he ever wrote, there’s a good chance that no one could have done the song justice quite like its author whenever Wilson got behind the glass.
Because even if there were fantastic musicians in The Beach Boys, there’s no point in anyone else trying to make a song like ‘Surf’s Up’ work the way it does. Wilson’s high falsetto will never be matched by anyone in the pop world, and even when the rest of the band had different passes at singing his tunes, there’s a good chance that no one could have delivered a message like ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ with as much gusto as he could at the end of Pet Sounds.
But the key sound of the band wasn’t Wilson’s singing or even arranging; it was all of their voices together. ‘I Get Around’ is among the greatest tunes that they ever made, but if you were to take any member’s voice off of the song, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Even if the world might have a net positive if Mike Love wasn’t playing with them, it was still a joy listening to them all sing together.
Then again, each of them had a different timbre to their voices every time they sang. The Four Freshmen was definitely the band that they all drew from when making their classics, but Wilson’s soft-hearted voice was never going to get the job done on one of their rockers like Dennis Wilson could. Each of them seemed to have that familial sense of harmony, but Carl Wilson’s voice is one of the most fantastic instruments to come out of the 1960s.
Which is strange because not everything he sang back in the day was the most demanding part by any stretch. He was more about understanding the mechanics of where his voice was in the context of the rest of the band. When the audience needed a heartwrenching tune, Carl was normally the one who made everything sound so beautiful when playing tunes like ‘God Only Knows’.
And even long after his brother passed away, Brian still felt that there was no one else in the business that could have done justice to his songs as Carl did, saying, “He was probably one of the better singers in the business. He was a really good singer. He took directions beautifully in the studio. He learned songs very quickly and did a very good job on them.” Then again, that kind of compliment is a lot more than some brotherly love.
If you listen to the rest of the music world, there are moments where some of the band’s biggest fans were trying to get that sound Carl did without thinking about it. Tom Petty knew the song ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ was missing something until Carl put those soaring harmonies over the chorus, and even when Brian was making his final records with The Beach Boys, there are moments where you can hear him filling in the parts that Carl would have sang had he got to see them close out their career.
But, really, Carl seemed to be much more than the brother who did everything that Brian said in the studio. He knew that his brother had an element of genius to him, but if Brian was the acknowledged maestro behind all of those classic tunes, Carl was the heart of the band that kept everything moving forward.
