The passing of The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson on June 11, 2025 - just two days after the loss of another singular titan of '60s pop/rock, Sly Stone - obviously hits Team Second Disc and all our treasured readers hard. Here's a brief tribute from Mike to a man who could hear (and create) music like no other.

There are really two things I want to get out of the way in talking, briefly, about Brian Wilson. I could go on at length about his raw talent: the ways every person on earth who's ever had a "teen" in their age can feel the soul-deep ache of "Wouldn't It Be Nice"; the way that final build before the outro made me full-body sob while feeding my toddler daughters lunch today, things of that nature. But I don't have to. I'll get into why in a minute.

What I really want to talk about first is the way the world found out the news: a social media post accompanied by a striking photo of an older Brian, clad in a polo shirt, shorts, and what you could call "dad sneakers," smiling on a park bench just outside Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It is not a dramatic black-and-white tribute, not a staged shot of a genius at work in the studio from decades past. Brian Wilson could be your dad, or your grandfather, or a kindly old neighbor who you'd wave to before starting your car and going to work in the morning. As we read the testimonials of friends and loved ones sharing their favorite of the many, many, many wonderful compositions he made - and consider how the mysteries of the human brain seemed to constantly wage war against that direct line to sacred expression for Wilson's entire lifetime, eliciting terror, tragedy and unintentional comedy - it's worth remembering that, for all his gifts, he was a man, just like you or I. Except, of course, he also wasn't.

I also must express my thrill in what you're going to read below. When Joe contacted me - a fresh-faced, know-little college graduate - about writing for The Second Disc in early 2010, I was immediately taken not only by his engaging and informed writing, but his ability to write spectacularly about artists I never felt I had the literary knack for. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than with the music of The Beach Boys. Whenever a catalogue title comes down from UMe involving the work of Brian, Mike, Carl, Dennis, Al and Bruce - or some permutation thereof - I know Joe's gonna make more sense and engage me (and hopefully you!) with his coverage more than anyone else. When he has the nigh-impossible task of summing up a legendary career once its architect journeys to the next phase of existence, I am glad he's giving us all a space to feel our feelings. After all, for us - who only play around in the wake of the greatness that artists like Brian Wilson fan out behind them - one of the best things in life is remembering how that transcendent art affected not only us, but the people we care about and experience it with. If there's justice in the world, Joe will write a book on those boys from Hawthorne someday. In the meantime, I'm glad he's sharing what follows with you - and I'm grateful to you for reading it.

And now, Joe with a formal tribute to one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived:

I'm a cork on the ocean
Floating over the raging sea
How deep is the ocean?
How deep is the ocean?
I lost my way
Hey, hey, hey...

The Beach Boys' Surf's Up was released in the waning days of summer 1971. The album began with a warning - "Don't Go Near the Water" - and ended with two successive gut punches that left no doubt Daddy had indeed taken the T-bird away...perhaps for good. Before the ironically titled "Surf's Up" brought the album to a close, Brian Wilson's "'Til I Die" took hold. I'm a rock in a landslide/Rolling over the mountainside...I'm a leaf on a windy day/Pretty soon I'll be blown away... In just over two and a half minutes, the leader of The Beach Boys had distilled his innermost feelings of hopelessness, and the seeming inevitability of forces greater than he, into a soundscape of glistening beauty and profound sadness. It was viewed by many as a statement of retreat for the once-confident, once-prolific artist who could (and did) do it all. The man who spread the California dream all over the world as a singer, composer, lyricist, arranger, and producer admitted in song, it kills my soul.

But it didn't.

It was announced this morning that Brian Wilson died at the age of 82. When he exited the stage for the final time at Clarkston, Michigan's Pine Knob Music Theatre on July 26, 2022 following a concert with the band Chicago, it was to the sound of rapturous applause. It was a sound to which Wilson had become accustomed as he experienced one of the most remarkable rebirths in popular music. That rebirth - which saw him complete his long-abandoned masterwork, embark on a number of successful tours, record and release eleven solo studio albums, reunite with his famous band, and find the peace and happiness that had eluded him for so long - is all the more remarkable considering just how much he'd accomplished before the age of 30.

In such songs as "Fun, Fun, Fun," "I Get Around," "Help Me, Rhonda," and "California Girls" (all co-written with his cousin Mike Love), Wilson's shimmering melodies and joyful productions captured the euphoria of growing up in Southern California, surrounded by sand, surf, sun, and girls.  Songs such as "The Warmth of the Sun," "Kiss Me, Baby," and "Please Let Me Wonder" illuminated a more tender side, with a thoughtfulness and vulnerability every bit as authentic as the other songs' swagger. The Beach Boys' transporting family-based harmonies placed the sound of Brian's acknowledged favorites The Four Freshmen in a vivid, contemporary context unparalleled in the pop landscape.  For Brian, though, the sweetness of his music often masked - or, more likely, was composed in response to - the turmoil of his personal life.  A tumultuous childhood led to a young adulthood with everyday pressures compounded by the demands of being a full-time recording and touring artist...and Brian's own fierce competitive streak.  The stress of his personal and professional lives was taking its toll, and in January 1965, Brian announced that he would be leaving The Beach Boys' touring group to concentrate on the studio.  The results were startling, and startlingly personal.

With 1966's Pet Sounds, Wilson found the truest expression of his own musical voice. Underneath the stunning musicality - those densely layered harmonies, intricate melodies, and majestic, unusual arrangements with organs, harpsichords, theremins, dog whistles, bells, strings, horns, wood blocks, and more - Wilson poured his whole heart into the album's thirteen tracks. Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston lent their voices to deliver an entire spectrum of emotions in a song cycle of splendor and sensitivity. Pet Sounds may initially have been conceived as an answer to The Beatles' Rubber Soul, but it became an elegy to lost innocence ("Caroline, No"), a hope for the promise of brighter days ahead ("Wouldn't It Be Nice"), and a raw expression of one young man's innermost heart and soul ("I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," "That's Not Me," "You Still Believe in Me") as he struggles with impending adulthood.  That Pet Sounds also may have the greatest pop song ever written in "God Only Knows" (like most of the album, co-authored with Tony Asher) is almost superfluous.  Despite an initial lack of commercial success, Pet Sounds became the yardstick by which other albums are measured.

The pressure to follow it up became too much for Wilson's fragile psyche. The ambitious "teenage symphony to God" known as SMiLE was begun in 1966 and announced for release in 1967. With lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, it wouldn't be completed until 2004, by which time Wilson had already persevered through a litany of personal losses (including the deaths of his younger brothers Carl and Dennis) and well-publicized battles with one demon after another. The premiere of SMiLE at London's Royal Festival Hall on February 20, 2004 was the triumphant culmination of a long journey (recently chronicled by Wilson's longtime friend David Leaf in his book SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson) filled with heroes and villains alike. What emerged on that stage - and subsequently on records in both Wilson's 2004 solo recording and the long-awaited 2011 Beach Boys box set - was as sprawling as Pet Sounds was focused. Intense, funny, sad, haunting, delicate, majestic, and fantastical, SMiLE fulfilled its promise as an album that would have changed, or at the very least challenged, the conventions of pop. Through its disappearance and what followed, though, it did.

"Good Vibrations," which likely would have appeared on the original SMiLE LP, emerged as a standalone single in October 1966, crafted in a modular fashion from dozens of sessions and hours upon hours of tape. A "pocket symphony," it crystallized the psychedelic pop movement in three and a half minutes, topping the charts and earning anthemic status.

Brian's intimate experiments in the 1970s foreshadowed the emergence of lo-fi pop; indie artists latched onto the childlike lyrics and DIY feel of such homespun compositions as "Johnny Carson" or "Solar System." There were flashes of the old magic, too, such as 1977's ravishing "The Night Was So Young" (an adult successor to Pet Sounds) or 1979's shimmering "Good Timin'."

1988's Brian Wilson announced the Beach Boy as a solo artist and introduced his beloved "Love and Mercy," a simple, heartfelt plea that would become his signature encore on the concert stage. Even more personal music would arrive in the new millennium as Brian was revitalized with a new band and a new family. (He married Melinda Ledbetter in 1995; they remained united until her death in 2024.) Surrounded by such close collaborators as Darian Sahanaja and the late Jeffrey Foskett, Wilson had the support system to flourish. He reteamed with Parks for 2008's song suite and love letter to California, That Lucky Old Sun, and teamed with one of his heroes, Burt Bacharach, for the buoyant single "What Love Can Do."

"Midnight's Another Day" from That Lucky Old Sun and "Summer's Gone" from The Beach Boys' 2012 reunion That's Why God Made the Radio might be the last great songs to bear Brian Wilson's credit as composer. Both find the artist embracing melancholy even as he acknowledges having come out the other side.

With an indomitable spirit and the voice of an angel, Brian Wilson was the embodiment of survival. He inspired others by writing and speaking openly of his struggles with depression, schizoaffective disorder, and auditory hallucinations. Brian's 2015 album No Pier Pressure (his final album of original songs) closes with "The Last Song":

Don't be sad

There was a time and place for what we had

If there was just another chance for me to sing to you

There's never enough time for the ones that you love...

There will never be a last song for Brian Wilson, whose works will endure as long as there's music. God only knows what we'd be without you.