Love and mercy

On Brian Wilson, my dad, and love through the shared language of music

“Hey,” I said quietly. “Did you see?”
“No, what?”
“Brian Wilson died.”
“Shit.”

My dad was on his way home from the animal hospital. They had just put down Gabe, our sweet old Labrador, and he hadn’t had the chance to tell me yet. Gabe had been sick for a while, but the timing of this news felt cruel, like I had personally hurt him by calling to tell him.

I’d found out less than a minute earlier, sitting on a friend’s back porch in the sun. I opened Instagram 37 seconds after the announcement was posted to Brian’s official account—one of the several times I’ve felt a weird, cosmic tie to him. His family broke the news themselves. I Googled it and found nothing. No headline, no press. Just those words from his loved ones, released into the digital ether. I knew I had to call my dad before he found out anywhere else.

The Beach Boys—and by that, I mean mostly Brian Wilson—wrote the only scripture my dad ever followed. He treated their music like something sacred that needed to be passed down carefully and completely, and he did exactly that. For my 18th birthday, he gave me my first two vinyl records: Pet Sounds and Abbey Road. It played out almost exactly like that scene in Almost Famous: “Look under your bed. It’ll set you free.” And it did.

I already knew the music of Pet Sounds because it had always been there, floating through my childhood and playing softly behind all of my memories. But holding it in my hands and putting down the needle myself felt different. My dad never sat me down and said, “Here’s how to feel things.” He didn’t have to. He just gave me music and I learned for myself. Early in my life, I think that my dad probably knew—whether consciously or not—that I’d need that kind of music like Pet Sounds someday, the kind that could hold your hand through the ache, the kind that doesn’t look away. Throughout my life, through the songs he would play for me and the albums he would buy for me and the rock documentaries he would make me watch and the music history lessons he’d give me, my dad quietly built a shelter around me, made of harmonies and drum fills and guitars. Through music, I learned how to understand my dad and I learned how to understand myself.

When I moved into my freshman year dorm, Pet Sounds came with me. I’d lie on my bed in the no-AC sticky September heat with the record spinning across the room and let the whole thing play through—side A, then side B, then side A again. Standing up to flip the record over felt like my own version of prayer. When I was out of my room, I listened to it on my phone. I constantly played it in my car. There was something about having it in my ears that made me feel less alone. Like Brian could see me—freshly 19, homesick, overwhelmed, reaching out for something solid—and he wasn’t afraid to sit with me.

Pet Sounds cracked something open inside of me. It was longing and fear and tenderness and regret, all asking to be heard, placed in beautifully perfect harmony by Brian Wilson. It was a record that didn’t just reflect emotion—it held it, felt it, and let it back out into the world. And once I really understood that, I finally understood why my dad had handed it to me like a compass that I would need for the rest of my life.

In my life, like in music history, there is before Pet Sounds and after Pet Sounds. Even now, almost 60 years later, it still feels like a glitch in the emotional timeline of pop music—something too soft, too grown-up to have ever come from a group of early-20s California surfer boys. But that was Brian’s magic trick: while everyone else was chasing hits, he was at home, building a masterpiece out of vulnerability. He was turning feelings into musical architecture on which he could lean for the rest of his life.

Brian Wilson never fit the story people told about him. He was a surf-rock wunderkind who couldn’t surf. A boy genius who made stadiums full of people sing but couldn’t always leave his house. He became a myth before he became a man, and the myth was shallow: just sun, sand, good vibrations. But the real Brian was haunted by sounds only he could hear and demons beyond what anyone could comprehend. Schizoaffective disorder, auditory hallucinations, long stretches of reclusion, years under the control of a cruel doctor. He lived inside a brain that made beauty and suffering in equal measure. He felt the world so intensely that it nearly broke him—and still, he made something beautiful out of it.

He very boldly did not belong to this world, but he gave the world something to belong to: melodies that feel like hope, harmonies that feel like forgiveness. A voice—reedy, boyish, deeply human—sitting carefully above a heart that cracked just enough to let the light in.

I’ve seen The Beach Boys in their current form a good handful of times with my dad and have loved hearing those songs live from most of the members. My favorite was seeing them with my dad at the Ryman in February 2020. But, like something out of a dream, I got to see Brian Wilson live in April 2017. Just before I wrapped up my junior year of college, my dad, my sister, and I went to Old National Centre in Indianapolis to see him play Pet Sounds in full for its 50th anniversary. He sat at the piano the entire show and had to be helped on and off stage. A lyric screen guided him through the set. But none of that mattered—not to me, not to anyone in that room. We all knew what we were witnessing and we knew how important it was. Everyone sang along, cried and clapped, stood in awe and reverence for harmonies that had carried us through our own heartbreaks, our own coming-of-age. It was the closest to God I’ve ever felt.

I’ve spent a lot of time with his music in the days since his passing. Listening on walks, on the couch, in the car. Talking with my dad about it. Reading texts from friends who knew what Brian meant to me. I’ve felt a new and particular kind of grief that comes from losing a person I never knew, but who still made me feel seen and understood in ways people I do know have never done. Brian Wilson did that for me. And for my dad. And for so many people who needed music that could sit quietly next to our sadness and not try to fix it.

I learned to love music from my dad. But I learned how to feel music—how to let it split me open and put me back together—from Brian Wilson.

Here’s a playlist of some of my favorite Brian Wilson/Beach Boys songs, in case you need them. And you do—everyone does.