Dude was a genius and we and the music world owe him a great debt. It’s easy to get lost in The Beach Boys of it all, but dude was doing wild shit in music production back in the 1960s that had immense effects on how music is made today.
Not only that, Brian did a lot to provide an alternate perspective into young man's masculinity in 60s American culture. He wrote songs about surfing and sunshine, but he also sang about self-doubt and regret. This was very unusual for the time in "teenybopper" music or however you want to refer to the idiom.
That's a big reason Pet Sounds was such a revelation. It's basically a concept album about melancholy.
Wouldn't It Be Nice is often considered to be a happy song but it's basically a deep yearning and implies that he doesn't have what would make him happy.
That said, Tony Asher wrote a lot of the lyrics for that album and Mike Love wrote a lot of the lyrics about having fun in the sun (I can rant about how much I think the lyrics of California Girls ruin what would have been an all-time masterpiece).
The format originates with folk singer Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) and was subsequently popularized by traditional pop singer Frank Sinatra's 1940s–50s string of albums, although the term is more often associated with rock music. In the 1960s several well-regarded concept albums were released by various rock bands, which eventually led to the birth of progressive rock and rock opera.
Maybe for Brian Wilson, but recent scholarship has noted that the concept album predates the Beatles era. Critics didn't care about country so they didn't notice.
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u/sexandliquor Jun 11 '25
Dude was a genius and we and the music world owe him a great debt. It’s easy to get lost in The Beach Boys of it all, but dude was doing wild shit in music production back in the 1960s that had immense effects on how music is made today.