In December 1964, on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston, 22-year-old Brian Wilson had a panic attack. Soon afterwards he stopped touring with the Beach Boys and stayed at home in the studio, where he made Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations”, records that many musicians still regard as the high point of pop. Wilson died on June 11, 2025. He was 82. His family announced his death.
The Beach Boys
Wilson was born in Inglewood, California, on June 20, 1942, and grew up in nearby Hawthorne. In 1961 he formed the Beach Boys with his brothers Carl and Dennis, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine. He wrote, arranged and produced most of their early hits, songs about surfing, cars and girls such as “Surfin’ U.S.A.”, “I Get Around” and “California Girls”, built on layered vocal harmonies that he arranged himself.
Pet Sounds and Smile
Pet Sounds, released in 1966, used session musicians, unusual instruments and complex arrangements to tell a story of growing up and loss, and included “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. Paul McCartney called “God Only Knows” one of the greatest songs ever written. “Good Vibrations”, recorded in pieces over months, followed later that year. Wilson’s next project, Smile, collapsed in 1967 under the pressure of his ambitions and his deteriorating mental health. He finally completed and released it in 2004.
Illness and recovery
For years Wilson struggled with mental illness, drug use and the controversial control of the psychologist Eugene Landy. His life was dramatised in the 2014 film Love and Mercy. With his wife, Melinda Ledbetter, he rebuilt his career, touring and recording into his seventies. After her death in 2024, a court placed him under a conservatorship because of dementia.
Wilson spent most of his life too anxious to perform comfortably, yet the music he made alone in the studio in his early twenties is still being studied and copied sixty years later.