”Til I Die’: the best harmonies that Brian Wilson ever wrote
Brian Wilson was always at his best when spiking his glittering harmonies with a dose of pain.
It’s not an immediate sensibility when considering The Beach Boys’ sunny Californian songbook. On one end are the surfer pop and hot rod numbers that pepper their early output, scoring the state’s post-war mythos as kids caught waves and cruised the streets with a level of unprecedented leisurely freedom and material abundance.
Then there was Wilson’s eccentricity. Not long after Pet Sounds’ lauded afterglow, the gang were penning numbers on the importance of eating your vegetables and ecological plight sung from the perspective of a tree.
When Wilson channelled his existential pangs, however, his harmonies truly soared. As far back as 1963, in the zenith of their smiling sunshine pop infancy, Surfin’ USA’s haunting ‘Lonely Sea’ dared to cast a shadow over the blue yonder’s crashing waves, depicting the ocean as a salty abyss featured in Moby Dick over the fodder for teen rock and roll. Later, Wilson’s prematurely-aged melancholy would shimmer over The Beach Boys Today!’s sophisticated balladry two years later, paving the way for the holy heights of ‘God Only Knows’.
By 1971, Wilson’s mental health had taken a serious knock, the creative captain displaying erratic behaviour and depressive episodes hindering The Beach Boys’ output. Stepping up to take the reins, younger brother Carl assumed a de facto leadership of the group, soldiering on for that year’s Surf’s Up, a tauter, less complex production imbued with a more introspective tone than had yet been heard, and boasting the last true Wilson classic.
Surf’s Up’s finest moment had been floating around for a couple of years before seeing the light of day. After a bout of morbid reflections, ‘The Lonely Sea’s poetic chasm inspired a spiritual sequel for ‘’Til I Die’, Wilson once again facing off the ocean’s ruminative wrestle in search for meaning.
“Was there an answer?” Wilson recollected in 1991’s controversial Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story autobiography. “Did I have no control? Had I ever? Feeling shipwrecked on an existential island, I lost myself in the balance of darkness that stretched beyond the breaking waves to the other side of the earth. The ocean was so incredibly vast, the universe was so large, and suddenly I saw myself in proportion to that, a little pebble of sand, a jellyfish floating on top of the water; travelling with the current, I felt dwarfed, temporary.”
The following day, ‘’Til I Die’ began to take shape. Amid such contemplative ache, Wilson’s most majestic harmonies were plucked from that distinct Beach Boys ether. Playing out with elemental marriage like the lyrical lone leaf in life’s windy gust or the cork adrift in that raging, metaphorical sea, exquisitely stirring vocal choirs were arranged just like their golden heyday a few short years prior, shimmering popcraft twirling with the weighty enormity of its philosophical yet unpretentious snapshot of Wilson’s private crisis.
Some fine songs would follow, Carl’s steering of The Beach Boys producing some admirable efforts on 1973’s underrated Holland, but Surf’s Up stands as the last classic album from the Californian pop band, ‘’Til I Die’ the final testament to Wilson’s ingenious songcraft, where, for barely two minutes, the grand, unyielding cosmos is bottled in all its terrible beauty with sage authority.
