Postwar Dreams, Pop Symphonies, and the Genius of Brian Wilson

One of my earliest memories is listening to the Beach Boys.

For my father, they weren’t just a band—they were a time machine. He was part of that postwar wave that caught the California dream at full tide. He surfed. He lifeguarded at Jones Beach. And when the Beach Boys hit the airwaves, it felt like the soundtrack had finally caught up to real life—sun, speed, salt, and youth in eternal bloom.

At first, it was all joyrides and jukeboxes—Surfin’ U.S.A., Little Deuce Coupe, the thrill of American adolescence. But as the ’60s deepened and the skies darkened, so did the songs. And at the center of it all was Brian Wilson.

Today, we learned that Brian has passed, at 82.

So: Brian Wilson is gone. Another architect of American music. Another side of the coin—Sly Stone, too, just earlier this week.

And it’s worth pausing here—because genius is a word we toss around too easily. But Brian Wilson was a genius. If he’d been born in the 1700s, he’d have been writing court music for kings. Instead, he gave his symphonies to the surf, and his psalms to the suburbs.

He fused Chuck Berry with Bach, barbershop with Baroque, crafting pop that could stand beside anything in the Western canon. Pet Sounds wasn’t just a turning point for the Beach Boys—it was a turning point for music itself. Paul McCartney, who famously saw Brian as his only true rival, once called God Only Knows “the greatest song ever written.” When he heard Pet Sounds, he saw the future—and responded with Sgt. Pepper.

Ten years ago, I saw Brian perform Pet Sounds at the Beacon Theatre in New York. It was transcendent. The closest thing I’ve ever witnessed to chamber music in pop. There he was—fragile but radiant—surrounded by an extraordinary band, playing music that had once nearly broken him. Now, he was lifted by it.

It wasn’t nostalgia.
It was resurrection.

Surf’s Up……

It starts with a whisper. Gm7 over D—modal and melancholic, not quite G minor, not quite sure of anything. Already the music is hovering in some harmonic elsewhere. This is Brian Wilson in 1966, perched at the peak of his powers and the edge of a cliff. He recorded the vocal alone in a studio, just voice and piano, while America was still pretending it could hold on to Camelot.

That tape sat in a vault for five years.

When Surf’s Up finally emerged in 1971—patched together by Carl Wilson and the rest of the band—it sounded like nothing else from the Beach Boys, and nothing else in American music.

My father, home from Vietnam and disillusioned, didn’t hear it as a return to the old surf glory. He heard it as a requiem. For him, the dream had already dimmed. He no longer believed in the bright American promise the Beach Boys once soundtracked—now it was something more fragile, more ghostly, more true.

Leonard Bernstein once called Surf’s Up the greatest piece of music ever written—and while that might’ve been the champagne talking, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Surf's Up is not just a song. It’s a keening. A premonition. A hallucination of empire in collapse, rendered as an avant-pop cathedral.

If we want to get clinical about it, the Schenkerian structure of Surf's Up reveals a broken descent. The melody toys with the idea of resolution, flirts with tonal closure, but never lands. The descent from scale degree 3 to 1 is interrupted—suspended in modal ambiguity, drifting through suspended dominants and inverted chords.

It’s not form as in sonata form.
It’s form as fracture.
A lament in the guise of a lullaby.

And yet, beneath all the harmonic smoke and linguistic surrealism—“Columnated ruins domino”—there’s a spine of coherence. The first section circles a long-delayed tonic, with pedal tones and voice-leading games that evoke Schubert more than Spector. The second part, with Carl’s soaring voice layered over Brian’s ghostly original track, turns elegy into rapture.

And the harmonies that swirl to the heavens in a final cadence?
They never quite arrive.

The music dissolves, unresolved—like the decade it mourns.

This isn’t just a eulogy for a lost America.
It’s personal.

Today, thinking about when he played Surf’s Up at the Beacon Theatre—he sat like a statue behind the piano, surrounded by a chamber-pop phalanx of musicians reaching the final round—“A children’s song… have you listened as they play?”—I cried.

I thought of my father.
I thought of the dream.
I thought of how fragile it all was—and how beautiful.

Surf’s Up isn’t a hit.
It isn’t an anthem.
It’s a ruin.
A sacred ruin.

Maybe that’s why they still echo.

And that’s what I want to leave you with. For the uninitiated, I’m linking a playlist. Because knowing the Beach Boys—really knowing them—is, in many ways, knowing postwar America. The innocence and the illusion. The sun-drenched dream and the unraveling beneath it.

Brian Wilson lived all of it. The breakdowns. The silence. The long exile. But in the end, he got to see the world catch up to what he had built. He got his reappraisal. He got his flowers while he was still here.

Maybe that’s a kind of American redemption too. That after all the noise and cruelty, the country found its way back to one of its true originals.

And maybe, just maybe, there’s still a harmony left for the rest of us to sing.