June 12, 2025
A Leaf on a Windy Day
Word about Brian Wilson’s passing began arriving on the internet by mid-afternoon on June 11. We haven’t yet reached the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds or of the sessions that comprised its ill-fated follow-up Smile, yet its creator was now no longer with us, joining the ranks of those who have earned a start and a finish date to their time here. That was the first thing noticeable when checking online that day. The second was his age, something now incapable of moving forward from the ‘82’ listed in headlines.
Wilson’s music, spanning seven decades, never rested in finalities like that. It celebrated life and people, their growth and understanding, their love and spirit, and it never allowed itself to wallow in despair. It could be about longing or falling in love, yet it never brooded. And yes, it was philosophical at times, acknowledging mortality, but it refused to succumb to the dark. One need only listen to the majestic “‘Til I Die” to understand that.
It’s appealing to write a tribute encompassing all the great songs and albums from Wilson’s career, to discuss his genius as composer and producer. It’s tempting to recount how he changed the shape of popular music while jousting with the Beatles for supremacy or to lament his fall from creativity and the plunge into substance abuse. But the albums, from early surfing collections to the pocket symphonies of the mid-1960s and beyond, are available to revisit or to explore for the first time. So are books like Philip Lambert’s essential Inside the Music of Brian Wilson and Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys in Critical Perspective that parse the musical genius behind the Beach Boy. There’s also the unofficial Unsurpassed Masters series of CDs to understand how Wilson’s studio productions treated sound the way a painter uses brush and palette. There are the biographies like Steven Gaines’s Heroes and Villains and Peter Ames Carlin’s Catch a Wave, along with the memoir I Am Brian Wilson, to cover the history. There’s plenty to keep any interested music fan busy.
That’s why the conclusion of this article will focus on At My Piano, Wilson’s album of instrumental piano renderings of his work that snuck in largely unnoticed four years ago. It was, for me, the go-to CD upon hearing of his passing, containing as it does a sampling of the artist’s best-known compositions in stripped-down, unplugged form. No lead vocals or layered harmonies, no production style we’re used to hearing from Wilson. It’s not meant to replace the classic recordings, only to position the composer, unaccompanied, in the context of his creations in what is now their last public encounter.
At My Piano is a meditative album, a collection of mostly Beach Boys songs rendered so directly, so honestly and so unadorned that the harmonic and melodic beauty of the compositions are at their most apparent. There is no attempt on Wilson’s part to embellish or to cross into jazz’s methods of reinterpretation. Each performance is a demonstration of how the song works, how modulation directs the dynamics of a piece or how a melody sits within or traverses a rich chordal structure on “God Only Knows,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” “You Still Believe in Me,” “Surf’s Up,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “Good Vibrations” and seven other tunes. In his inimitable way, Wilson offers the opportunity to hear each song once again for the first time.
The piano, Wilson wrote in the liner notes, “has brought me comfort, joy and security.” For the rest of us, it has provided a catalog to be treasured.
Epistrophe 
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