The song Brian Wilson played to his daughter every day: “He never seemed to get tired of it”
When Brian Wilson died on June 11th, 2025, aged 82, fans around the world mourned the loss of a true icon. As the creative force behind the Beach Boys, his music captured the sunny highs of 1960s surf rock – but also carved out space for some of rock’s most heartfelt reflections on love, pain, and devotion.
The mark that Wilson’s talents left on the music industry cannot be overstated. Both Bob Dylan and Graham Nash have called him a genius. Metallica’s James Hetfield once said that the Beach Boys “speak to a higher power”, later remembering Wilson after he passed as “one of the most amazing songwriters on the face of the planet”.
Surpassing genre and generations, it seems as though Wilson’s contributions have touched every corner of rock and pop history. Known for his quick, innovative thinking in the studio and seemingly endless flow of ambition, it is easy to forget that he, too, was simply a music fan, emulating who he regarded as some of the greats. One band, and one song in particular, reverberated in Wilson’s mind for decades.
At a birthday celebration for Brian Wilson the year before his passing, Carnie Wilson paid tribute to her father by singing The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’. She described it as, “A day I will never forget. I sang my Daddy’s favorite song EVER to him”.
Singing with the Brian Wilson Band and Matt Jardine, son of Beach Boy Al Jardine, she looked back on the moment as “almost an out-of-body experience… I heard that song every single day of my childhood!”
Carnie continued: “He kept thanking me for hours and it was one of [the] highlights of my entire life… Happy Birthday Daddy. Love, Your Baby.”
Indeed, Brian Wilson was captivated by ‘Be My Baby’. While on a drive in the 1960s, The Ronettes’ tune came on the radio and, immediately struck, Wilson pulled the car over so that he could analyse the chorus. He soon went and purchased the single, playing it on his home jukebox ad nauseam. Fast-forward to the Seventies and, as the other Beach Boys would be recording in Wilson’s basement, he would be sitting alone, blasting ‘Be My Baby‘ at maximum volume with the curtains closed, completely enveloped in Ronnie Spector’s voice and producer Phil Spector’s sound. His fascination with the song would soon inspire his own: ‘Don’t Worry Baby’.
‘Be My Baby’ was the first Ronettes song produced by Spector and featured his infamous ‘Wall of Sound’ production technique, which has since been emulated by countless musicians in the decades since.
Speaking with The New York Times in 2013, Beach Boy Mike Love shared that Wilson once compared the song to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and claimed that he had listened to ‘Be My Baby’ at least 1,000 times. Fellow Beach Boy Bruce Johnston countered this, remembering: “Brian must have played ‘Be My Baby’ ten million times. He never seemed to get tired of it,” and called the song the best ever recorded.
Wilson himself spoke of the song’s impact on him, revealing that his consistent drive in the studio was done in part to level with Spector’s production. He once said, “I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song, and I never did, I’ve stopped trying. It’s the greatest record ever produced. No one will ever top that one.”
