by Brian Wilson was never someone that needed a collaborator all the time.
He was writing rock and roll symphonies in many respects, and all it took was the right idea to pop into his head for him to be off on another pop odyssey with The Beach Boys. But when looking at their entire body of work, there was always going to be a bit of a hurdle for him to branch that far outside of the traditional teenage love song that everyone else catered to.
To his credit, though, it’s not like anyone was complaining that much about writing style. A lot of the beauty of Pet Sounds is how innocent it sounds from front to back, and while Mike Love can’t help but smear his own sheen on top of a few of their most famous tunes, it’s hard to really think of too many of his antics getting in the way of Wilson’s melodies. Because when ‘Good Vibrations’ is playing, there’s hardly any reason to pay attention to every single lyric.
Wilson was clearly making music that you could feel in your heart before actually dissecting any of the lyrics. ‘God Only Knows’ could easily serve as a hymn if they had taken all the lyrics and played the whole thing on an organ instead of with pop singers, but when coming off of The Beach Boys’ masterpiece, there needed to be a different angle for him to work in that wasn’t necessarily Pet Sounds 2.
If you really think about it, though, Wilson was at a slight disadvantage compared to his competition. The closest rival to him in the music industry was The Beatles, but since they had three incredibly strong songwriters by the time they released Sgt Peppers, how was anyone supposed to expect him to make the exact same thing but better with only the music he heard in his head?
For a brief moment in time, though, Smile looked like it was going to be the musical miracle that everyone was waiting for. Wilson had grand ideas for what he wanted everything to sound like, but even when he had to scrap the entire thing after nearly having a psychotic breakdown, he still had fondness for working with Van Dyke Parks on tracks like ‘Heroes and Villains’.
Eventually getting released on Smiley Smile, Wilson considered this one of the peaks of his creative relationships with other writers, saying, “‘Heroes and Villains’ was written in the sandbox, too. That one’s one of the greatest collaborations ever done. It really was. That was me and Van Dyke again, and it feels like almost a couple of different songs put together.” Sure, it didn’t follow the traditional structure of a pop tune, but when was the last time that was a bad thing for Wilson.
He had made a name for himself rewriting the rulebook of what pop songs could sound like, and even if not every tune was an absolute masterpiece or anything, there are countless writers that came after him that studied everything on tunes like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’ to see if they could have some of that magic rub off on them when they made their own masterpieces.
Although Van Dyke Parks did have a way with words that complemented Wilson’s music perfectly, it’s not like he was in any competition for a spot in The Beach Boys. Wilson still ran the show, and even if the songs sounded a bit more grown-up, there was always that sense of child-like whimsy that came out whenever those harmonies came in.
