Photo: by Takahiro Kyono / Creative Commons license
The legendary songwriter and founding member of The Beach Boys died today at the age of 82. Part of his singular legacy is a song that has been hailed by Paul McCartney as the greatest song ever written — one that was for its time considered controversial because it dared to have the name of God in the title.
As it turns out, Brian Wilson was a God-haunted soul and deeply spiritual.
The story behind it from Jordan Runtagh at Aleteia:
In 1964, 22-year-old Brian Wilson wrote a love letter to Marilyn Rovell, the woman who would soon become his first wife. He ended the note with a poignant sign-off: “Yours until God wants us apart.” Like his best music, the line was a tender blend of youthful passion and spiritual reverence, marred by a ceaseless undercurrent of anxiety. Each of these forces defined his tumultuous early life, forming a “holy” trinity in his psyche that would ultimately drive him to create the Beach Boys’ greatest artistic achievement, 1966’s Pet Sounds. The album’s emotional centerpiece, “God Only Knows,” echoes the words of his billet doux, and also the maelstrom of feelings that inspired it. In the half century since it was recorded, the track has entered the canon of timeless love songs, and been cited by Paul McCartney as the greatest ever written. The decades of praise make it all the more remarkable to recall that the song was initially banned by radio stations in the southern United States. “God Only Knows” provoked an outcry upon release, infuriating the pious who felt that using the Lord’s name in the title of a pop song was nothing short of blasphemous.
This couldn’t have been further from Wilson’s intent. As a composer, the divine factored into all of his work. “I believe that music is God’s voice,” he once explained. For the Beach Boys’ 1964 Christmas album, Wilson arranged a choral version of “The Lord’s Prayer,” and his aborted 1967 work SMiLE — which he famously dubbed his “teenage symphony to God” — opened with “Our Prayer,” a wordless hymn reminiscent of Gregorian chants. But the spirit was most notably present for his 1966 opus. “When I was making Pet Sounds, I did have a dream about a halo over my head but people couldn’t see it,” he said in 1996. “God was with us the whole time we were doing this record. God was right there with me.”
At the time the song was written, referencing “God” in a title or lyric was generally considered a taboo for pop music, and there had been at least one recent instance of a record being banned from radio for having words such as “hell” or “damn”. [Co-writer Tony] Asher said that he and Wilson had “lengthy conversations” about the lyric, “because unless you were Kate Smith and you were singing ‘God Bless America‘, no one thought you could say “‘God’ in a song…. He said, ‘We’ll just never get any air play.” He believed that Wilson agreed to the title after being told by other people that it was “an opportunity to be really far out [because] it would cause some controversy, which he didn’t mind.” [Author Mark] Dillon wrote that referring to God may have also been viewed as “a square move” due to the nascent decline of traditional religion in the United States.
Rest in peace, Brian Wilson.
