Brian Wilson’s 20 Greatest Songs

Is this the Beach Boys’ singular peak moment? Arguably, but close to indisputably, yes. Is it also the apotheosis of all popular music in the rock era, if we had to pick just one? Let’s not argue about this — even if you’re no Brian Wilson cultist, in your heart and spirit, you know it’s at least in the running. Mike Love wrote the lyrics, and if you consider them on their own, they might feel a little hippie-dippy… and say, isn’t “excitations” for the sake of a rhyme cheating? Get thee behind me, Satan, with that kind of talk. When word meets celestial music, there is not a moment of imperfection in a song that miraculously invites you to travel through symphonic-pop section after subsection, as Brian and his harmonizers and full force of the Wrecking Crew make mincemeat of everything you thought a pop song could or should be, in the run-up to the Summer of Love or now.

A ballad that has been sung at every sentimental occasion — 400,000 weddings and a funeral, for starters — but not because it feels like it’s built to accompany formal affairs. It is sung by an angel, Brian’s brother Carl, who feels like a confidante of God’s because the love of a woman has taken him that high. “The world would still go on, believe me,” he sings, acknowledging that the earth might still turn if he should be abandoned, yet Brian’s music is so lofty that that slight allowance feels like a lie. This is all-or-nothing love… interrupted by a strange, rat-a-tat instrumental bridge that leads into a final choral cushion you could just about lay yourself down in forever.

The lyrics are quite specific, and hardly universal, about the danger the singer is facing — the same threat Bruce Springsteen faced a decade and a half later in “Racing the Street.” (Bruce’s gal seemed a little less certain that Brian’s that her guy would come out of the race unscathed — maybe it’s the same couple, 10 years later and less naive about immortality.) But listen, we all just kind of skip over the street race stuff in our heads, anyway, right? Because this is a gorgeous dream of how utterly supportive a mate might be, fit for any romantic situation. Brian and lyricist Roger Christian wrote it for the Ronettes and Phil Spector after hearing “Be My Baby,” and thank God that didn’t come to pass. Because there’s only one person who could have sung it more plaintively than Ronnie: Brian himself. Or, actually, Carl, come to think of it — but this is one occasion when Brian, too, like his brother, was able to sing like a girl. He so successfully embodies the feminine ideal during the chorus that he almost doesn’t need to add the “she says” to signal that the point of view has changed to a woman’s at the outset of the chorus. Brian, in this recording, you made for one beautiful lady.

To the theorem that even the saddest Beach Boys song will still make you happy: this is the one that most tests that. There haven’t been many darker existential laments in the history of literary fatalism than this lonely cry right from the heart — from Brian’s heart, quite specifically, since this is the rare number in which he was solely responsible for the lyrics as well as music. “I’d been depressed and preoccupied with death,” he explained in his memoir (which, although ghost-written, seems to accurately convey his state of mind here. “Looking out toward the ocean, my mind, as it did almost every hour of every day, worked to explain the inconsistencies that dominated my life; the pain, torment, and confusion and the beautiful music I was able to make. Was there an answer? Did I have no control? Had I ever?” But what sublimity there was in hearing Brian sing, “I’m a cork on the ocean, floating over the raging sea.” (Which might count as the most optimistic part of the song.) “These things I’ll be until I die,” he vows in the hauntingly repetitious coda. Now that his life is ended, we can hope he didn’t really always feel that way… but depression is no walk on the boardwalk.

As Don Henley later sang: This is the end of the innocence. Or at least in retrospect “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” felt like the last song of the first half of the ’60s. There’s a reason Hal Ashby used it at the end of “Shampoo” — as ironic commentary on what the ’60s later became, with the song’s hope that sleeping together might be in the cards someday seeming like a lost and sad artifact of pure romance in the age of sexual liberation. As with a lot of the Beach Boys’ best songs, there’s a very slight undercurrent of sadness already built into the music, as if the protagonist has already figured out that this dream of happily-ever-after won’t come true. But with Brian so plaintively singing the lead (with Mike chiming in later, via the buddy system), you sure want to believe it’s no false hope.

It’s the song whose title became Brian’s eternal sign-off… and the phrase his family went out on in announcing his death. The sing-along chorus is a “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding” universal plea, to all of Brian’s fellow humans, for gentleness and empathy. But what helps sell the song is how specific Brian is in the verses, and what triggers his heartfelt angst about the state of humanity. “I was sitting in a crummy movie… The news came on TV…” First of all, the word crummy has just never been used in enough song lyrics. But beyond that, we all understand how hard it is to stay high when everyone else is going low. Here’s to making this highlight of Brian’s solo career an anthem again in the crummy year of our lord 2025.

Truly, masterpieces come in small packages. How giddy is it possible to become in under two minutes? (Don’t answer that, veteran drug abusers.) We’re thinking of the perfectly legit doses of ecstasy that is “This Whole World,” one of the brilliant songs that proved Brian still had it after the abandonment of the “Smile” project. It’s not a song that got a huge amount of attention when it first came out in 1970 on the “Sunflower” album, at a time when the Beach Boys were kind of being set aside in American culture, even as they produced fruitful work. Then it kind of started to pick up attention when Wilson put out a live album as a solo artist in the late ’80s and this song got the lead-off position — like the obvious set-opener and smash it always should have been. Melodically, it is just one of the wildest roller coasters you could ever go on, seeming to change keys and chord progressions every few bars or so, in a way that sounds completely incoherent in theory and in sheet music, but not on record. This masterpiece ends on an abruptly inconclusive fade-out at 1:58 (give or take a couple seconds), daring you not to hit “repeat” a dozen times or more to get your fill. This is one of those rare tracks where Brian wrote the full lyrics as well as music, and a sense of being awestruck by the whole planet prevails. Now, the song isn’t nearly long enough for Brian to offer examples of why it’s such a wonderful world… except for girls. Girls are definitely wonderful.

Before David Crosby sang “Almost Cut My Hair,” and made that sound like the most dramatic near-miss ever, Wilson sang about a girl who did cut her hair — and being a guy sensitive enough to realize that this represented the end of the world. No pageboys or bobs for Brian: He knew (or lyricist Tony Asher did) that sacrificing the feminine ideal of long locks for something more fashionable or practical was selling out. It’s kind of a wild leap to make, but when you hear this song, somehow, it completely makes sense that the singer is bereft about the use of scissors, and some wider abandonment that this act represents. It was originally released as Brian’s first solo single, before coming out a few months later under the Beach Boys’ name as the forlorn climax to “Pet Sounds.” Did Wilson think he should release it on his own, at first, because it seemed too sad for the brother act? Later on, “Til I Die” would come along and say, “Hold my beer,” but for the time being, this was as big a downer as the Beach Boys could commit to. Of course, we’d all like to think that Caroline was so moved that she didn’t darken the door of a stylist again for years.

“You and me both, Brian,” so many hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people have thought, listening to this song over the last 60 years. It’s an immediate gotcha, anyway, for anyone who ever considered themselves an empath, introvert, nostalgist and/or Highly Sensitive Person. The lyrics for this key “Pet Sounds” centerpiece were by Tony Asher, but there was little doubt he was channeling Wilson here — a narrator who feels out of step, too easily affected and brought down, and wary that even retreating to a room of one’s own is not enough to survive an existentially hostile climate. It’s enough of a signature song for Brian that Don Was picked it as the title when he directed a 1995 documentary about Wilson. For a lot of the rest of us, in 2025, this number is still practically a daily mantra.

Braggadocio never sounded more justified than in the hands of the Beach Boys. When you can harmonize like that, who would stand in the way of them using their hard-earned “real good bread” to drive their hot rod to wherever hipster enclave they can find and steal everyone’s girls? Mike Love, who sings the verses, reportedly came up with the unforgettable intro, but the dynamics that follow are pure Brian genius, from the simple/sophisticated music instrumental bed to him bustig out his most pristine falsetto on the choruses. “The bad guys know us and they leave us alone,” Mike sings — probably not literally referring to the Beatles, with whom they were suddenly chart rivals. But when this song hit No. 1 in 1964, it was at least a temporary reclamation of American culture amid the British Invasion.

It was Virginia Woolf who wrote the book “A Room of One’s Own.” But it was every teenager who ever lived who wrote “Leave me alone” in invisible letters across their foreheads, wishing and hoping that their bedroom could remain their one place of retreat and sanctuary. Once again, lyricist Gary Usher encapsulated a feeling we can very easily and realistically ascribe to Brian, although in his case the “room” could have also been Western Studio in Hollywood or any of the other recording studios that Wilson was able to make into his fiefdom. Although the theme is ostensibly kind of adolescent, this 1963 track was a major marker in the more mature themes that Wilson and his co-writers would develop. And a bold take on how scary and isolating the world can be, coming on top of the delighted extroversion of most of the Boys’ early hits. When Brian’s voice is joined by Carl’s and Dennis’s, and then, for the big hook, Al and Mike, it’s one of pop music’s great blankets of safety.

Have you ever heard the old songwriting maxim “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus”? Well, nobody ever said that about a Beach Boys song, or at least a great one. If anything, sometimes you wished the brilliance of some of Brian’s verses could have been prolonged. And how about those stand-alone intros, like the calliope-like prologue to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” — or the 22-second instrumental preface to “California Girls,” which has nothing much to do with the rest of the tune, at least until we return to a subtle reprise of it in a bridge at the 2:10 point. Even if Mike Love never started singing, this song would be a work of art. But of course he does, and pop muaic had its greatest exercise in comparative geography ever. The Beatles may have been inspired by “Pet Sounds” to up their game for “Sgt. Pepper,” but when they decided to do a direct Beach Boys parody, of course it was “California Girls” they admiringly aped for “Back in the USSR.” It took a mighty impressive song for all the Midwest farmers’ daughters and hip east coast girls out there to buy this 45, regardless of the Beach Boys putting them in their place.

If “California Girls” has an antithesis in the Beach Boys’ catalog, it might be “Cabin Essence,” originally conceived as part of the ambitious “Smile” project. Lasting only three and a half minutes, it seems to go through as many different distinct movements as a classical piece — starting out as a gentle, banjo-driven cowboy song, then suddenly proceeding to a veritable tornado of rising harmonies that feel either exhilarating or a little bit scary or both. There’s a big of legendary Beach Boys lore attached to this number: Van Dyke Parks was the lyricist, and before recording his vocal, Mike Love demanded to know the meaning of lines like “Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield.” (Later on, Love would call this “acid alliteration,” which is not a bad description.) Regardless of whatever fateful confrontations were happening over the band’s lyrical direction, this is masterful music on Brian’s part — a “cabin in the sky” where Americana and choral psychedelia could share space. (Look also for the fuller-sounding remake on the 2004 “Brian Wilson Presents Smile” album.)

This initially overlooked 1964 treasure was never released as a single in the U.S., remarkably. But an on-the-nose synch at the end of “American Graffiti” brought it to the forefront of moviegoers’ consciousness in 1973, and thereafter. It’s the jauntiest possible ditty about impending doom — or, to put it in less dramatic terms, the imminent approach of autumn. “We’ve been having fun all summer long,” they sing in falsetto, celebrating the glory that is in its final days. Soon, all that carefree frolic will be as gone, gone, gone as slippery Suzanne Somers in that white ’56 Thunderbird. A cheery woodwinds break makes it sound like the Beach Boys are whistling on their way to the summer graveyard.

Possibly the most misleading title in Wilson’s or the Beach Boys’ catalog: Woe to the casual fan who streams this thinking it’s one of the band’s early fun-in-the-sun songs based solely on its name. Instead, this haunting, multipart ballad sounds like an elegy for all that, with its deliberately ironic branding. But even if you came for the surfing, you may stick around for the heady lamenting — this is far and away one of the group’s most beautiful tracks. It was planned for the “Smile” project of 1967, and the remnant recorded then was hen finally completed by Brian and his brother Carl and released as the title track of a 1971 album, at a time when the Beach Boys were trying to reinvent themselves as a more mature, counterculture-friendly act. Van Dyke Parks wrote the lyrics, full of “columnated ruins domino / Canvass the town and brush the backdrop.” We don’t know what it means, either, but the whole thing makes us feel impossibly sad and exhilarated.

The Beach Boys never did finish the “Smile” album, at least not in its day. But if you’re trying to think of a way to make that feel less tragic, consider this, the brilliant song that was ostensibly a lead-off single for the project, and think: Who needs a full album when you’ve got a track so ambitious that, by the time its three minutes and 36 seconds are up, you feel like you’ve ingested a full album? OK, we did still need all the other tracks, but if the Beach Boys had never released another song after “Heroes and Villains,” we’d still be talking about their ability to reinvent the wheel that is a pop single. Van Dykes Parks got his most successful set of lyrics for the band in here, bringing in evocations of the Old West that are played for whimsy, and allowing Wilson to invent a mini-song cycle that, for all of its insane inventiveness, felt just cozy enough on the radio to become a top 20 hit.

A quintessential Brian song, in so many ways — he was the sole writer of “Surfer Girl” as well as its lead singer, and this marked the first time he was credited as producer. It wasn’t the Beach Boys’ first hit — they’d previously broken into the top 20 with “Surfin’ Safari” and the top 10 with “Surfin’ USA.” But as the last of a succession of hits with “surf” in the title, this was the first time there managed to feel like there was real depth in those waters. The longing in his voice as he wonders whether he can win the love of that board-wielding wondergirl is an aspirational ache that would continue to power so much of the band’s best numbers. And the easy harmonies did the group’s squarer inspiration, the Four Freshmen, proud.

Brian and Mike reported that they sat down to write this in the immediate wake of the Kennedy assassination. Self-soothing never produced a more enduring result. In the song, it’s a girl that’s left, not a president, but same difference. The Boys feel “the warmth of the sun” in the afterglow of night, and rather than feel like denial, the song really does have the comforting sense that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have felt the summer heat at all.

Best one-minute song ever? Maybe. Don’t bother looking up the lyrics for this one — there aren’t any — just a murdererers’ row of top-flank singers bringing their A-game to what was intended to be the a cappella prelude to “Smile.” It’s a short but impossibly sweet example of how the group could turn itself into a full choir, not needing no stinking lyrics to bore into your soul. If you know and love this track (which also got a gorgeous 21st century remake on “Brian Wilson Presents Smile”), there’s a good chance that any time you’ve ever walked into a liturgical church in the years since, you secretly hoped the choir would throw the hymnal aside and just break into “Our Prayer.”

If you’ve ever looked at pictures of yourself as a kid and fallen in love with that whippersnapper — while feeling a little heartbroken at how little resemblance the grown-up you has to that long-lost child — well, that may be the feeling you have listening to “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man).” By the time the Beach Boys released this as a single in 1964, they were already arguably Beach Men, so there is already a slight tinge of nostalgia to the song’s anticipation of maturing. But how brilliantly did Wilson and writing partner Mike Love capture those youthful questions every self-aware kid has about whether it’s possible to bring the sense of wonder you feel into adulthood, or whether you’ll just turn into your parents. It’s also one of those dogged tracks where, whatever else is going on in the track, they treat the title phrase like the world’s greatest commercial jingle.

Bonus track time. Many decades after “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man)” and “All Summer Long,” the Beach Boys closed out their final studio album as a unit with a track that allowed that the endless summer had found an end, and they had grown up not just to be men but to grapple with mortality. This may or may not quite be on a par with the greatest Brian songs of the 1960s and ’70s, but as a big swing at recapturing the evocative style of the group’s most wistful classics, it’s successful enough to deserve a place as an asterisk on this list. With a little help from his friends, Brian still had it. And by proxy, so did we all, even as we melted into a song that addresses the prospect of losing it all.