The Many Women Who (Supposedly) Inspired Brian Wilson’s First and Only Top 40 Solo Record

Songs can (and often do) stem from a myriad of inspirational sources, but there’s something extraordinary about the amount of crossover, contradictions, and sheer number of people named Carol when it comes to Brian Wilson’s first and only Top 40 hit as a solo artist, “Caroline, No”. Beach Boys fans will, of course, recognize this track as the closer for the band’s seminal 1965 album, Pet Sounds.

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But two months before this album came out, Wilson released “Caroline, No” as a standalone single with “Summer Means New Love” as the B-side. Wilson wrote the song with Tony Asher, who also co-wrote Beach Boys hits like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows”. Between Wilson and Asher alone, there are upwards of six stories explaining the origins of “Caroline, No”.

And that’s not even including what the rest of The Beach Boys had to say about it. Needless to say, “Caroline, No” is about a lot of different people, depending on who you ask.

The Many Women Who Inspired “Caroline, No”

In his memoir Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Brian Wilson wrote that “Caroline, No” came from him reminiscing about his high school crush, Carol Mountain, to Tony Asher. He added that the marital strife between him and his first wife, Marilyn, also influenced the song. “We were young, Marilyn nearing twenty, and me closing in on twenty-four,” he recalled. “Yet, I thought we’d lost the innocence of our youth.”

Brian Wilson’s brother and bandmate, Dennis, also confirmed the idea that “Caroline, No” was about Carol Mountain. “He saw her again years later, and it all came back to him, and he wrote the song,” Dennis said, per Billboard.

Asher, on the other hand, said that Wilson never talked about a girl named Carol Mountain to him. But his first girlfriend was named Carol Amen, and that’s who Asher was thinking of while they wrote “Caroline, No”. (As for the transition from Carol to Caroline: Asher reportedly suggested the title, “Carol, I Know”, and Wilson misheard it.)

Finally, decades later, in a 2007 interview with Record Collector, Wilson asserted that the song wasn’t actually about anyone at all. “It just used the name Caroline,” he said. Wilson said the only reason he released it as a solo single ahead of Pet Sounds was because he “wanted it. I asked the company to put it out because I thought it could be a hit, but it wasn’t.”

Breaking into the Top 40 isn’t too shabby, all things considered, though it’s easy to see why peaking at No. 32 would feel less-than stellar to a member of The Beach Boys. In any case, the resounding success of Pet Sounds two months later likely helped to make up for that initial disappointment.

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