The unlikely Beach Boys album Brian Wilson called “the best we ever made”
Brian Wilson has made his entire career by making people smile with his music. Although he had to sacrifice a hell of a lot of his own personal sanity to make a lot of The Beach Boys’ classics, he ended up putting together the kind of immaculate pop symphonies that would take most people decades to try to figure out. Wilson may have been comfortable calling Pet Sounds his finest work, but in terms of the best album that the band put out, it all came back to The Beach Boys Love You.
Then again, any Beach Boys album that came out after Pet Sounds would be living in its shadows. While Wilson had tried to make different forward-thinking pop music, this is when the pop album became something more than a collection of songs, following the lead of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul by making songs that served as a statement rather than just another romantic tune.
Just when the band would have capitalised on it, though, Wilson nearly fell apart. After trying in vain to make something even better than his first masterpiece, Smile would be put on the shelf for years at a time, with Wilson never quite nailing down what he wanted until a version of the album was released in the 2000s.
Wilson needed help, and he found the worst man for the job in Dr Eugene Landy. After undergoing harsh therapy sessions with the psychiatrist, the musical mastermind would be cooped up in his bed for years under his control before cutting him out of his life completely. Somewhere in between the emotional torture, Wilson found his way back to music on The Beach Boys Love You.
Featuring the first time that Wilson wrote most of the lyrics, this ushered the band into the next phase of their career with synthesisers and Wilson working away trying to create that old magic. That’s before you look at any of the lyrics, though.
For all of the great sounds present on the album, there are also more than a few times when the songs have aged incredibly poorly. The occasional song tends to tap into the youthful innocence Wilson had when he was younger, but then there are songs like ‘Roller Skating Child’ and ‘I Wanna Pick You Up’ that sound like they are being sung by a man who shouldn’t be allowed within fifty feet of a school.
Regardless of the lyrical clunkers, Wilson would say that the album was among the finest works that he ever made with The Beach Boys, claiming in the book Catch A Wave, “That’s when it all happened for me. That’s where my heart lies. Love You, Jesus, that’s the best album we ever made”.
Looking at it through Wilson’s head, it’s much easier to see the full picture. Since a lot of his adult life had been lost to people trying to run his life for him, The Beach Boys Love You feels like it occupies a similar space to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band from years prior. After trying to fade into the background of his own life, Wilson was crying out for the first time, aching to return to his child-like innocence when he first picked up a guitar.
