Brian Wilson has left us.

And now the sunlit myth of California—once so golden, so forever young—feels like it’s setting for good.

He was 82.

But like the waves he immortalized, the echo of his music rolls on, reaching some distant, perhaps holy shore.

They called him a genius. And they were right. But it wasn’t just the stacked harmonies or the pocket symphonies. It was the ache underneath them—the haunted, trembling voice of a boy who heard things no one else could—all while partially deaf. He gave us surfboards and sunshine but also prayer and peril.

He gave us “God Only Knows” and meant every word of it.

He gave us “Heroes and Villains” and wrestled with both.

His compositions were never just music.

They were life—encapsulated in modern verse.

All the triumphs, all the trials, all the tribulations.

All the heart racing, all the heartache.

Always emphatic. Always authentic. In a league of their own.

And often, it was in the counterpoint—the harmony itself—where the meaning was found.

He was born in Hawthorne, California—middle-class, postwar, unremarkable. But even there, in a house of clipped hedges and big dreams, something extraordinary stirred. A transistor radio crackled. A piano beckoned. And young Brian, ears tuned to angels, began his great labor: to hear the world as it ought to be.

He wrote music like a man searching for home in every note. “Surfer Girl” may have floated with innocence, but “Don’t Worry Baby” was a psalm and a plea. “In My Room”—his quiet confession—invited us into his solitude. He was both a pioneer and a prisoner and his songs never let you forget it.

By the time Pet Sounds arrived, he had outgrown the car songs and coconut oil.

What emerged instead was a masterpiece shaped by tenderness and torment—an album that made Lennon weep and made McCartney declare “God Only Knows” the greatest song ever written.

Not bad for a kid from Hawthorne the world mistakenly assumed only wanted to go surfin’.

The paradox of Brian Wilson was always this: he made music for joy while drowning in sorrow.

His world was one of contradictions—bells and basslines layered over breakdowns, harmonies stitched over hallucinations.

He once wrote “’Til I Die,” a drifting dirge filled with the weight of a man losing his grip on everything—except the knowledge that some part of him would never change.

“These things I’ll be until I die”—not just a refrain, but a reckoning.

Years later, Brian explained that the song’s haunting tone came from a single note: he placed a B♭ over a G major 7 chord, creating what he called resonance in the key of G.

He also said he wanted the lyrics grounded in nature—“earth, water, rocks and leaves.”

And he did. The result, one close observer noted, was the most vulnerable lead vocal he ever recorded.

Still, he kept returning. Broken, medicated, manipulated, institutionalized—but never silenced.

Through legal guardians and doctors turned Svengalis, he continued to compose.

He still sang.

He still found a way.

And through it all, he remained masterful at his craft—until the end.

In the America he sang about, there was always another wave to catch. A girl at the drive-in. A convertible to chase freedom down the coast. But that America—the one that lived in Wilson’s music—always had a shadow.

He knew that, too. And he loved it anyway.

Brian’s final decades were not a victory lap—they were a kind of resurrection.

There were the solo tours, the long-delayed release of Smile, and the tributes from artists who owed him everything. He was still fragile, still off-center, still receding behind his own eyes—but he kept performing.

And when he closed his concerts in later years, it was almost always with “Love and Mercy”—a song he wrote in 1988.

It wasn’t a chart-topper. But it didn’t need to be.

It was a prayer—for a better world—an aspiration. A benediction whispered from a soul that had known both chaos and clarity.

And when Brian sang it, it felt like he’d written it just for us.

And now he is gone.

But what remains should not be conveniently categorized as nostalgia.

It is something more profound, more enduring—a body of work that stitched America’s fractured soul—already fraying in the 1960s and now threadbare—into the grooves of vinyl.

What remains is a simple truth: if you want to understand love, heartbreak, beauty—even prayer—you could do far worse than to start with Brian Wilson.

So now we hear him in the background of our lives:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older…”

“I may not always love you…”

“Guess I just wasn’t made for these times…”

And maybe he wasn’t. But he came anyway.

He brought the sound of a nation dreaming. Of teenagers longing. Of grown men remembering. And sometimes, of grieving.

On Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson gave us not just innocence—but its disappearance. In “Caroline, No,” he wasn’t mourning a girl. He was mourning the passing of time, of purity, of everything that once felt whole.

“Where did your long hair go? / Where is the girl I used to know?”

The track ends not with a flourish but with a stark, discordant whimper: dog barks and a passing train to parts unknown. The suburban California dream dissolving into something sadder, stranger, darker—more grown-up, and maybe lost forever.

And then there was “Sloop John B”—a shimmery melody masking the sound of unraveling.

It originated as a Bahamian folk song, first published in 1916 and later recorded by artists such as The Kingston Trio and Johnny Cash.

But the version we know best—the one etched into the American songbook—is Brian Wilson’s arrangement, refined with help from fellow Beach Boy Al Jardine.

“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on…”

Its harmonies were golden, but the heart of the song was homesickness. The music soared while the soul sagged.

It wasn’t just a sailor’s lament. It was Brian’s. The boy who made California sound like paradise, whispering that even paradise can feel like exile.

That was the genius of Brian Wilson. His joy was authentic—but so was his sorrow. And somehow, he let us hear both, in perfect harmony.

His music will endure—will even transcend time—so long as there are stars above us.

And somewhere, on the edge of memory, the quiet waves of “Pacific Coast Highway” and “Summer’s Gone” still roll in.

They were the final two tracks on That’s Why God Made the Radio—the Beach Boys’ last studio album, recorded for their 50th anniversary in 2012.

Intentional or not, they felt like benedictions.

Some critics called them funeral dirges. Perhaps.

But I hear something else. They were Brian’s farewell—in his voice.

“Sunlight’s fading, and there’s not much left to say…”

“Sometimes I realize / My days are getting on…”

And then, the final lines of the final verse on the final track—so simple, so human it hurts:

“We laugh, we cry / We live, then die / And dream about our yesterday.”

It was the most essential music he had written in decades.

A final gift. A whisper to the heavens.

He made us laugh, and he made us cry.

And he left us much more than dreams about yesterday.

Because Brian Wilson may have left the stage—but the music never will.

Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC

Image: IthakaDarinPappas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.