Who knows what really happened to Brian Wilson? By the time modern audiences came to know and love his work, something was deeply, observably amiss within the mind and body of the California-born musician. Some blame the overbearing father. Others just chalk it up to the mundane stuff of life. Psychosis, heartbreak, dementia, etc. Most people say it was the drugs. Okay—it probably was the drugs. In this life, some get sick, some don’t, but in the end, everyone dies. On Wednesday, Wilson died and we all lost an American Mozart. 

And so, I spent Wednesday listening to Pet Sounds. And then Surf’s Up. And then Loves You. And finally, as the day was coming to a close, I put on the Smile Sessions. What a career. Thank you, Dennis and Carl and Mike and Bruce and Al. But most of all, thank you Brian. What art. What great, uniquely American art. Sun-drenched and timeless. Not unlike the California coast he and his bandmates called home.

In the home where I grew up, the Beatles reigned supreme. Then it was the Stones. After the Brits, Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Merle Haggard were the sort of standards that blared from the Technics record player that lived in our dining room. Beyond the quintessential pop standards of the late ’60s, my father really was a fan of the great western songwriters of the prairie republic that spreads out between Texas and California. One thing we rarely listened to was The Beach Boys, so, for the early part of my life, all I knew of the Boys was surfboards and Mike Love. 

I think that’s what a lot of Americans know of The Beach Boys. Not Pet Sounds, but “Surfin’ USA.” The hang-ten, forever summer stuff. And that’s just fine. Listening to the catalog this week, I couldn’t help but circle back to the early stuff. Much like the Beatles, it’s easy to focus on the later career work that came to define the myth. But the early stuff is great too. “Surfing Safari,” “California Girls,” “I Get Around,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Those songs weren’t generationally successful pop tunes by sheer luck. They rock. They so clearly envision a vision of that pure Americana where the days are fun, and the girls are gorgeous, and the harmonies ripple out across the ether for all of eternity. The sound is so clean, inviting, and hypnotic it invites every listener to pick up their own private surfboard in the undulating waves of their mind. 

Speaking personally, it wasn’t until well into my late 20s when I really came to understand the appeal of the Boys, and specifically its ringleader Brian. I was in my Paul McCartney phase then and learned that McCartney considered Wilson’s “God Only Knows” the greatest song in the history of pop music. “It’s one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it,” McCartney told BBC Radio 1 in 2007. “It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian.” 

The track McCartney crowned the greatest of all time is one of 13 on Pet Sounds, released in 1966. The groundbreaking album has become mythologized by rock fans and critics alike. It was a critical hit, but a commercial failure. Working on it, Wilson battled private demons in and out of the studio. He worked as he often did, in an obsessive, singular manner that isolated those closest to him in his pursuit of greatness. The result: swirling vocal harmonies and endless studio experimentation, a supernatural pop aesthetic that still makes today’s great musicians marvel.

The millennial music project wouldn’t be possible nor complete without the inspirational tones and sanguine lullabies of one Brian Wilson. Animal Collective, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, Panda Bear, Vampire Weekend. All those groups have more in common with the Southern California groove Wilson manufactured than the sonic template of the Brits from that era. 

Wilson’s inability to coherently and cohesively engineer a finished product would come to haunt him in future studio projects. The Boys abandoned Smile, the follow up to Pet Sounds, due to a mix of personal, logistical, and creative reasons. Though the single “Good Vibrations,” one of Wilson’s best inventions, was released from those sessions, the album he teased as a "teenage symphony to God” was shelved, not to be released in full until decades later. Given the obstacles of those years, it’s a wonder Pet Sounds was finished at all. 

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The film director Bill Pohlad captured the chaotic energy of Wilson’s mindset and recording practices in his absorbing 2014 biopic Love and Mercy, a joy ride for serious and casual audiences alike. Paul Dano is brilliant as the slowly-detaching Wilson, desperate to finish the unconventional recording of Pet Sounds as pressures mount in all directions. Though the album was finished, Wilson suffered great psychological turmoil. 

“Brian Wilson, Pop Auteur and Leader of the Beach Boys, Dies at 82” read the breaking news headline in the New York Times on Wednesday afternoon. I immediately walked to the stereo and cranked it up. All the way up. “Mona,” “Cabin Essence,” “Caroline, No,” “Heroes and Villains.” Even “Shortnin’ Bread,” the song that drove Iggy Pop to run out of Wilson’s studio and proclaim, “That guy is nuts!” They’re all getting fresh spins and new listens today. 

Wilson went out doing what he loved the most—recording. In a post shared to Instagram in April, Wilson was in the place that came to define his life and legacy, the recording studio, surrounded by friends. He transformed the American experience in the way only artists can. The great loves and bitterness of life—Brian was there for a lot of them. His music played over many of America’s big moments in the late 20th century. The film director Cameron Crowe may have said it best in his brief eulogy of Wilson on Wednesday: “Those transcendent words and happy/sad melodies will be there for all time, waiting for each new generation.”