Posts Tagged ‘beachboys’
The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows | BBC News
9 October, 2014
A piece for the BBC about how Brian Wilson and Tony Asher composed God Only Knows.
These conversations were fractured. Wilson, who had been denied a childhood, would break off to show Asher his mechanical parrots or to watch episodes of Flipper, an “aquatic Lassie” series about a dolphin which invariably reduced him to tears.
In time, Wilson played Asher the pieces of music he had in mind for an album called Pet Sounds and Asher essayed some lyrics to fit the themes Wilson had in mind. When they got to God Only Knows, things didn’t start well. Wilson felt that “I may not always love you” was absolutely the wrong way to kick off a love song. Too negative, he insisted.
Indebted to Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff, Kingsley Abbott’s Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century, Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern Californian Experience and Brian Wilson’s Wouldn’t it be Nice: My Own Story (with Todd Gold (and Eugene E Landy)).
- Other 60s pop dissected: What a Wonderful World; A Whiter Shade of Pale; Flowers in the Rain
- Much more on Murry Wilson at WFMU
- Image: South Pointe, Miami Beach
