RIP Brian Wilson. He was 82.

The term “musical genius” is thrown around way too much, but in the case of Brian Wilson, it’s very applicable. As one of the founding members of The Beach Boys along with brothers Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love, and high school buddy, Al Jardine, Brian was their songwriter, their arranger, and the guiding light in the studio.

The Beach Boys emerged in just before The Beatles arrived in America, selling the California lifestyle through their music. Within a few years, they were pushing The Beatles to get better. Paul McCartney often told the story about how Pet Sounds (1966) shocked The Beatles so much that they responded with Sgt. Pepper the following June.

I’ve always been fascinated by footage of Brian in the studio with The Wrecking Crew as he worked to translate what he heard in his head into what would become the “Good Vibrations” we all know. Watch as Brian gets completely lost in the music.

This interview with Harvard Business Review sums things up.

 “I wasn’t the type to sit around and be satisfied with an accomplishment, especially not in the studio. And I had ideas coming into my head all the time. Many had to do with using instruments as voices and voices as instruments. I would put sounds together to create something new. Some ideas didn’t work, because they were too difficult to achieve at the time. But most did. And then I immediately moved to the next thing.”

Check this out, too.

Here are the isolated vocals to the end of God Only Knows. Brian Wilson wrote and produced this at 23 years old pic.twitter.com/tZkgajBtCR

— Henry White (@Henry_White1996) June 11, 2025

But there were two sides to Brian: the musical genius and the tortured human. The troubled relationship with his father (a real piece of work who sold off much of the band’s music for a pittance), an uncaring record company (they changed the group’s name from The Pendeltons to The Beach Boys without their permission), his panic attacks leading to an end to touring with the group in 1964, the stories of his piano set up in an indoor sandbox so he could feel the sand between his toes while he wrote, the dodgy time with psychologist Eugene Landy (who later had his license stripped), and the rip-offs orchestrated by an evil manager.

Add in issues with drugs and alcohol and you have a man who could commune with the greatest of musical angels while suffering as a human being for decades and decades.

When I saw Brian Wilson at Massey Hall in Toronto some years ago, you could see this duality. When he wasn’t behind his keyboard, he looked like a lost soul shuffling around the stage. But when he sat down to play, wow.

Brian had been suffering from some kind of neurogenerative disease akin to Alzheimer’s for some years now. It was a cruel way for him to live out his years.