Brian Wilson's Genius Was Processing Anxiety Through His Music

This past week, the world lost one of the true musical geniuses of the Rock & Roll era in The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, who passed away at the age of 82.

The story of Brian Wilson is infamous and well-ingrained in Pop Culture history. From his childhood and early teen years under the thumb of his cruel, wannabe pop star father, Murry Wilson, to being the architect of some of the greatest songs ever written, falling down a deep hole due to his own mental health struggles & drug issues, slowly breaking out from his demons years later, only to be taken advantage of by another bastard in Psychiatrist Eugene Landy during the entirety of the 1980s, when Landy basically had complete control over Wilson and his affairs in an attempt to drug and coerce him into signing over everything he had (including, at one point, 70% of his will).

The last 35 years have seen a Brian Wilson that has been able to get proper treatment for his mental health, been surrounded by his family again, as well as seen the man produce a regular output of music; including finishing a version of SMiLE (the famed lost Beach Boys album that Wilson became obsessed over to the point of mental breakdown back in the 60s).

While it would be a lie to say Brian Wilson was rehabbed to the point of being completely cogent the past 35 years, he has certainly been afforded a level of peace and care that had been previously unavailable to him when he needed it most.

All of this and we didn't even get into Mike Love.

And we're not going to. Because fuck Mike Love. This is about Brian.

For all of the anguish, insecurity and anxiety this man has had to process in his life, we only need to look at his music and the emotions he was seeking to excise from his brilliant mind to realize that Brian Wilson truly spoke through song.

At a time when most Pop songs were about getting the girl or what someone would do to get the girl, when Brian had complete freedom over the songwriting, he chose to look inward and write about how he's nervous and unsure of himself or that he's afraid of losing a girl he doesn't even have yet.

'Don't Worry Baby' starts off with the lyrics:

Well its been building up inside of me

For oh I don't know how long

I don't know why

But I keep thinking

Something's bound to go wrong

My body feels weird, I have no idea why, and something bad is going to happen is not exactly traditional Pop song material at that time.

While someone like Bob Dylan was paving new ground by making broad political anthems that could galvanize and give voice to issues outside your window, Brian Wilson was doing the inverse and giving voice to complicated feelings inside our own heads.

'Please Let Me Wonder' is as strong a song as any Wilson has written and it's another song that, upon a casual listen, might be mistaken for being about a girl who is right there in the picture of your mind as you listen to it. But the brilliance here is that there's no girl at all. The song is about a guy imagining a girl he likes and being afraid to find out if she could ever like him like he likes her. So he resigns himself to just enjoying the sad purgatory of never knowing and never being able to get his heart broken, even if that means he's ultimately missing out on any kind of real love to begin with.

Pet Sounds is not only the crown jewel of Brian's creative prime, but an album emblematic of those complicated, beautifully-articulated feelings Brian was working through. Nearly every song is a musical sentiment steeped in anxious, teenage unease (save for maybe Sloop John B). Even the two instrumental tracks have a certain longing to them.

Even during his darkest days he could find a pathway through his mind to give voice to some truly, achingly existential emotions. 1971’s ‘Til I Die’ is all about how small we are in the universe and how we’re going to remain a tiny piece of a larger whole until we cease to exist. A long ways away from ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’.

Brian Wilson was brilliant enough that he could have easily coasted on crafting evocative soundscapes of California beaches and muscle cars. Instead he chose to take these uneasy feelings inside him and give them a voice.

To be able to summon the kind of mental energy to see finished songs in your head and get them out into the world fully-realized is a true gift. But the obsession to get those songs perfect was also a great burden. One that, now that his life is but a memory, people will look back on and assess in its totality.

To know that the same forces that helped Brian Wilson write genuinely life changing music for so many people are also some of the same forces that caused his various mental breaks can be a hard realization. But the solace comes in knowing that it was always Brian, the person, under all that anxiety, who pushed through to give us his music. He fought through mental brick walls to get his music out there and God Only Knows where we'd be without him.

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