Brian Wilson’s Song Cycles

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the Beach Boys’ eleventh studio album, Pet Sounds (1966), the group’s primary creator, Brian Wilson, set forth a compelling flow of lyrical themes across a shimmering soundscape to create what has been described as one of the earliest concept albums. Its eleven songs and two instrumentals in fact constitute a “song cycle” as conventionally defined, with a transparent narrative and artful progression of interwoven musical ideas. Further, Pet Sounds was but one of several explorations of multisong narrative and musical structures in Wilson’s work on Beach Boys albums, extending back to side two of their Today album (1965) and continuing in later years through the unfinished Smile (1967), Wild Honey (1967), and The Beach Boys Love You (1976). Since Brian Wilson began recording as a solo artist in the late 1980s, he has continued to conceive albums as unified artistic statements, achieving his goals with special clarity on That Lucky Old Sun (2008) and on the reunited Beach Boys’ That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012). Each of his song cycles is a unique realization of principles of organic unity found in the art-song tradition and makes its own important contribution to the history and development of the concept album in pop and rock music.