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Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys musician, songwriter and producer who created some of history’s most purely beautiful pop music, has died aged 82.
In a post shared on Instagram on Wednesday, Wilson’s family wrote: “We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away. We are at a loss for words right now. Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world. Love & Mercy.”
As the leading creative force in the Beach Boys, Wilson crafted a variously carefree and melancholy sound that came to define the uncertain utopianism of mid-century California. Using ambitious studio techniques to give the band’s music a thrilling grandeur, his songs about surfing, driving, girls and the pep of youth modulated to more reflective and often psychedelic material, resulting in one of the most highly regarded catalogues of American song. The Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds – written and produced almost entirely by Wilson – is seen not only as the group’s masterpiece, but for many is the greatest album of all time.
Wilson was born in Inglewood, southern California, in 1942. A natural musician with perfect pitch who could sing back phrases sung to him as a baby, he learned piano as he and his younger brothers Carl and Dennis fell in love with R&B, rock’n’roll, doo-wop and pop. Despite going partly deaf in one ear (possibly as a result of an attack by a local boy), he and Carl joined their cousin Mike Love to form the high school group Carl and the Passions, later bringing in Dennis and friend Al Jardine to form the Pendletones. They had been encouraged by Wilson’s father Murry, with whom Wilson had a complex relationship – he later said Murry was also physically abusive to him.
Wilson’s first song for the group, soon renamed the Beach Boys, was 1961’s Surfin’ – the first in a series of Wilson-penned hits such as Surfin’ Safari, Surfer Girl and Surfin’ USA, the latter reaching No 3 on the US charts and cementing their breakthrough.
Wilson graduated to producer, as well as songwriter, for third album Surfer Girl, and powered the group through an astonishingly high work rate, releasing 15 albums before the end of the 1960s. Wilson’s ambition meant that he strove not to be boxed in as a novelty band who sang about surfing and cars, and deepened the band’s songcraft – including on Pet Sounds, which was conceived as an overarching statement rather than a series of discrete songs, its complex arrangements featuring everything from orchestral instruments to Coca-Cola bottles.
Wilson began using cannabis and LSD, and said the latter was creatively useful – he wrote a signature Beach Boys song, California Girls, while on his first trip, and said acid allowed him to “come to grips with what you are, what you can do [and] can’t do”. But his drug use, coupled with his intense workload, likely exacerbated mental health problems that had started when he was a teenager suffering from anxiety.
He heard voices in his head, spent time in psychiatric hospitals during the late 1960s, and became somewhat isolated from his bandmates. Wilson would eventually be diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and mild manic depression. He said in 2019: “There were times when [his mental illness] was unbearable but with doctors and medications I have been able to live a wonderful, healthy and productive life.”
Amid his difficulties, Pet Sounds’ follow-up Smile was never completed (though was later adapted into a 2004 solo album, and the original recordings eventually released as The Smile Sessions in 2011). His bandmates began to contribute more to the songwriting, though Wilson compositions still occasionally featured as the group emerged from a commercial downturn at the close of the decade to record the acclaimed Sunflower and Surf’s Up albums (the latter’s title track a psychedelic return by Wilson to his earlier fixation).
After the death of his father, the early 70s were a low period for Wilson, as his drug intake increased along with his weight, and he became isolated once more. He came back into the Beach Boys fold for 1976 album 15 Big Ones, but descended again into alcoholism, drug abuse and overeating towards the end of the decade; he also endured the death of Dennis who drowned in 1983. Closely controlled by psychologist Eugene Landy, his equilibrium improved in the 1980s, and, having finally split from the Beach Boys, he released his self-titled debut solo album in 1988.
The early 1990s was another fractious period: Wilson was extricated from his arrangement with Landy – who had become a songwriting collaborator, and got himself added to Wilson’s will via a conservatorship agreement – with a restraining order filed against Landy. Wilson was sued by his mother, Carl, Love and Jardine for defamatory statements in his 1991 memoir, and again by Love the following year over royalties, which was found in favour of Love.
Wilson continued to tour and release occasional solo albums, and eventually reunited with the Beach Boys in 2011 (now without Carl, who died in 1998) for a tour and the album That’s Why God Made the Radio. The group split once more, with Love touring under the band’s name and Wilson and Jardine separately touring together, including for a 50th anniversary Pet Sounds tour in 2016.
Wilson sold his publishing rights to Universal for $50m in 2021 and played his final concert as part of a joint tour with Chicago a year later. In 2024, it was announced that Wilson had dementia and months later a judge placed him in conservatorship.
Wilson was married twice, first to Marilyn Rovell in 1964, with whom he had two daughters, Carnie and Wendy (who later formed a vocal group of their own, Wilson Phillips, and scored three US No 1 singles). Wilson and Rovell divorced in 1979. In 1995, he married Melinda Kae Ledbetter, who he first began dating in 1986 and who also became his manager. They adopted five children together. Melinda died in January 2024.
In addition to his 1991 and 2016 memoirs, Wilson’s story has also been told in a biopic, Love & Mercy, starring Paul Dano and released in 2014, and a 2021 documentary, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road.
