3 Absolutely Insane Songs That The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson Wrote

A little over a year ago, we lost one of the most gifted pop songwriters of a generation. Brian Wilson changed the direction of pop music tangibly with his compositions, both in and out of The Beach Boys. And much of what made his work so memorable was how strange and ahead-of-its-time it was. Let’s look at just a few Brian Wilson songs that are still very strange but absolutely brilliant nonetheless.

“Fire” by The Beach Boys from ‘The Smile Sessions’ (Recorded Between 1966 and 1967)

Ah, Smile. The greatest, weirdest pop album that never was. The project might have been abandoned before Brian Wilson could finish what would have likely been his magnum opus, but thankfully, much of the material from that unreleased album got released in some form in the end. “Fire” is an instrumental track from the Smile sessions that dropped in 2011, decades after it was recorded sometime between 1966 and 1967. It’s an absolutely insane experimental avant-garde rock track, part of a series of conceptual songs about the elements. “Fire”, though, stands out. It sounds weird, sure. But the ethos around it is weirder. Wilson allegedly wrote and recorded the song during an LSD trip, one that took him on a quite existential journey through death and rebirth. 

“A Day In The Life Of A Tree” by The Beach Boys from ‘Surf’s Up’ (1971)

An interesting tone poem, “A Day In The Life Of A Tree” was a co-written effort between Wilson and The Beach Boys’ manager, Jack Rieley, who also sang lead on the track. It’s a bit of a hidden gem among environmentally conscious protest songs, one that I think deserves way more love nowadays than it gets. 

“[The song was] about the environment,” Wilson said of the song in his 2016 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson. “A tree thinking out loud (or thinking silently but singing out loud) about all the bad things that were happening to it. … [It’s] a big song because it’s about how people treat the earth, but it’s also a small song because it’s about how one living thing can feel stripped down and wrong for the world.”

It’s insane to think that way back in 1971, musicians like Brian Wilson were penning climate change anthems.

“Smart Girls” by Brian Wilson from ‘Sweet Insanity’ (1991)

I bet you weren’t expecting a rap track on our list of Brian Wilson songs. “Smart Girls” comes from Wilson’s unofficial 1991 album Sweet Insanity, in which Wilson spits out some bars. It was his first and last attempt at rapping, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. But if anything, it proves that Wilson was quite literally never afraid to get experimental with his music. And considering this song is about how Wilson finds women’s minds more exciting than their bodies, maybe we could say he wasn’t afraid to get on the feminist side of songwriting, either.

(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

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