Brian Wilson Details

Brian Douglas Wilson (born June 20, 1942) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition, extraordinary musical aptitude, and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His work is distinguished for its vocal harmonies, complex orchestrations, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson is also known for his past singing style, in which he sang high without engaging in falsetto, and for his lifelong struggles with mental illness.

Raised in Hawthorne, California, Wilson's formative influences included George Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach. In 1961, he began his professional career as a member of the Beach Boys, serving as the band's songwriter, producer, co-lead vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, and de facto leader. After signing with Capitol Records in 1962, he became the first pop artist credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. He also produced other acts, most notably the Honeys and American Spring. By the mid-1960s, he had written or co-written more than two dozen U.S. Top 40 hits, including the number-ones "Surf City" (1963), "I Get Around" (1964), "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), and "Good Vibrations" (1966).

In 1964, Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned from regular concert touring, which led to more refined work, such as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and his first credited solo release, "Caroline, No" (both 1966). As he declined professionally and psychologically in the late 1960s, his contributions to the band diminished, and he became much-mythologized for his lifestyle of seclusion, overeating, and drug abuse. His first comeback, divisive among fans, yielded the would-be solo effort The Beach Boys Love You (1977). In the 1980s, he formed a controversial creative and business partnership with his psychologist, Eugene Landy, and relaunched his solo career with the album Brian Wilson (1988). Wilson disassociated from Landy in 1991. Since 1999, he has toured regularly as a solo artist.

Wilson's accomplishments as a producer helped initiate a period of unprecedented creative autonomy for label-signed acts. He is considered to be among the first music producer auteurs and the first rock producers to apply the studio as an instrument. The zeitgeist of the early 1960s is commonly associated with his early songs, and he is regarded as an important figure to many music genres and movements, including the California sound, art pop, chamber pop, punk, dream pop, and outsider music. Wilson's accolades include numerous industry awards, inductions into multiple music halls of fame, and entries on several "greatest of all time" critics' rankings. His life was dramatized in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy.