How Brian Wilson Shaped These 4 Artists

Brian Wilson turned his suffering into sunny anthems, bringing joy to the rest of the world. A musical genius who detailed bright skies and blue waves, longing and solitude, inside orchestrated and groundbreaking pop songs. While the others surfed, he observed from a lonely seat on the outskirts of the beach party. He wrote about the light and dark sides of daily American life, from teenage love and heartbreak to the despair of fading youth and loneliness. The Beach Boys’ music feels like one long trip through the American dream.

Videos by American Songwriter

We are lucky to have lived while Wilson made records. He helped compose the great American soundtrack just as he shaped the following artists.

Richard Ashcroft (The Verve)

Richard Ashcroft’s signature song is “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, a neat title to describe the life of Brian Wilson. Ashcroft led The Verve through a tumultuous career that peaked with his masterpiece, Urban Hymns. You can hear Wilson’s influence both in Ashcroft’s ambition and in how he layers his voice into a psychedelic choir of Mad Richards.

“The Drugs Don’t Work” and “Space And Time” could have been Beach Boys’ song titles, and Ashcroft’s multi-tracked chorale on “Love Is Noise” is evidence of a man hooked on Pet Sounds. Then Ashcroft’s dream came true when he collaborated with Wilson on “Nature Is The Law” from Ashcroft’s second solo album, Human Conditions. Speaking of the human condition, no one distilled its essence into a song like Brian Wilson.

John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers)

The Beach Boys are one of the most important American bands in history, but they are also quintessentially Californian. Red Hot Chili Peppers may be the only other group within striking distance of that kind of Californication. And guitarist John Frusciante, like Wilson, survived the darkest corners of addiction while shouldering the burden of being a tortured genius.

Frusciante is famous for being a guitar hero, but his high singing style became a definitive part of RHCP’s California sound, too. He joined the band as a teenage virtuoso and led the group he once idolized through multiple masterpieces as a driving creative force.

Mike Mills (R.E.M.)

Mike Mills played bass in R.E.M., but his voice was a crucial counterpart to Michael Stipe. With Mills, R.E.M. had their own built-in composer. Someone who could play multiple instruments and help create subtle complexity in the band’s deceptively simple songs.

Peter Buck’s jangly chords recalled The Byrds, which put R.E.M.’s sound right in The Beach Boys’ backyard. But Mills’s high singing voice sat above Stipe’s baritone. In “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, Mills and Stipe blend their voices to lift the song past calamity and into shoulder-shrugging resignation: God only knows.  

Paul McCartney (The Beatles)

Who else? After hearing The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Wilson immediately went to his piano and sketched out “God Only Knows”. Rubber Soul was the new standard, and he had to surpass it. The result was Pet Sounds, initially a commercial flop but eventually one of the single greatest musical works in history.

“God Only Knows” then sent Paul McCartney away to write “Here, There And Everywhere”, track five on The Beatles’ Revolver. It sounds like The Beatles covering The Beach Boys. Both bands continued to push each other while revolutionizing the LP. However, before Wilson could finish Smile, McCartney and The Beatles beat him to the punch with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images