They’re All Dying
In May of 1998, my mother, who had been living in Florida for over a decade at the time, visited me and my family in Raleigh, North Carolina. I remember that visit distinctly for two reasons.
First, my two youngest children were just four and two at the time, and didn’t know their paternal grandmother very well. My youngest referred to her, sweetly and a bit awkwardly, as “my friend.”
The second reason came back to me just this past week.
On Thursday, May 14th, 1998, Frank Sinatra died. I worked from home in those days and, after reading the story online, walked into the room where she was reading.
“Hey Mom,” I said. “Did you hear? Frank Sinatra just died.”
I thought I was just passing along the news, assuming she hadn’t heard. But her response stopped me.
“Oh Billy,” she said, her voice tinged with genuine sadness, “they’re all dying.”
My mother had been a bobby soxer—a true teenage Sinatra devotee in the 1940s—and she never really stopped being one. I remember years earlier, listening to the radio in the car and asking her who her favorite musical act was. I figured she’d say the Beatles or the Stones. Maybe Elvis. But she didn’t even have to think about it: Frank Sinatra.
This week, as I considered the death of Brian Wilson, the troubled, fragile, enigmatic musical genius who, in 1962, founded the Beach Boys, my mother’s words echoed in my mind like a bell tolling across the decades.
“They’re all dying.”
And suddenly, I felt it. It hit me harder than I would have expected.
I was forty-two in May of 1998. My mom was sixty-nine. Frank Sinatra was eighty-two. As I write this, I am sixty-nine. At his death earlier this week, Brian Wilson was eighty-two.
When Music Becomes Memory
Perhaps it’s because music has such a hold on the psyche—because a song can instantly transport us across the years, summoning the smell of a high school hallway or the ache of a first heartbreak—that we sometimes overstate the importance of a song or the cultural weight of the artist who sang it.
This or that track was great, we insist, because Debbie Sedore and I belted it out in my beat-up old Dodge Dart on our second date. And while Debbie was amazing—truly way out of my league—the song was, if I’m honest, just okay.
But the opposite is true of Brian Wilson. His music needs no personal memory to prop it up. It’s not great because of where we were when we heard it. It’s great because it’s great. It is no exaggeration—indeed, it’s an understatement—to call him a genius, or to say that he and the Beach Boys transformed the landscape of popular music—and helped define the sound and spirit of the 1960s. And all the years since.
Beyond the Formula
I recently rewatched footage of both Paul McCartney and Elton John—two paragons of pop music, and musical geniuses in their own right—trying to describe the impact Brian Wilson had on their work. I marveled as they each struggled to put it into words.
Elton, apologizing for getting technical, tried to explain the use of inverted chords and voice leading—concepts that Wilson and the Beach Boys had woven into nearly every composition. At the time, these techniques were rare in popular music. And yet, Wilson used them effortlessly—to serve the emotional arc of a song. His work was sophisticated without being self-conscious—complex, but always human.
The perfect example of this: God Only Knows, from the 1966 Pet Sounds album.
Looking back, there are only three songs from Pet Sounds I still listen to. But in 1966, the album hit like a thunderclap. It wasn’t just new—it changed what music was allowed to be. And not in some abstract, theoretical sense. It changed the rules.
Even if you've never heard Pet Sounds—and surely you have—you’ve heard its fingerprints: on Sgt. Pepper, yes, but also in Pink Floyd, in Bowie, in Fleetwood Mac, in modern indie pop, and even in film scores. It taught pop music how to feel deeply, how to sound bigger than the room it was recorded in, how to infuse it with meaning.
I very much recall, as a twelve-year-old, being a little frightened of it. Pop music was no longer about dating, dancing, and heartbreak—it was no longer about simple melodies and a chorus you could sing along to.
Pop music was art.
And God Only Knows—aching and strange and transcendent—was its masterpiece. As we mourn the passing of Brian Wilson, nearly sixty years after its release, a masterpiece it remains.
Genius in a Love Song
If Elton John struggles to simplify the technical aspects of the song, surely I have no business even trying. But God Only Knows is such a sublime and sophisticated piece of music, an attempt must be made.
Most pop songs—then and now—follow a familiar structure: something like A-A-B-A-B-B. Verse 1, Verse 2, Chorus, another Verse, then a couple more rounds of the Chorus, to which we all sing along, as the song fades out. Maybe a solo or a bridge thrown in, sometimes called the “middle eight,” but the formula is sturdy. You see it in early Beatles. You see it in Taylor Swift.
You see none of it in God Only Knows. The song is sui generis.
Likewise, a typical pop song is built around a clear tonal center—it’s in a key. A song in the key of C, for instance, will use chords from that key and a melody that draws from the C major scale. Again, there are exceptions. But they’re exceptions that prove the rule.
In God Only Knows, Wilson not only rejects this formula but does so completely, as if he were unfamiliar with the entire Western canon. The song seems to begin in the key of E, but before the second measure is complete, the melody is pulling from–implying–the key of A. Throughout, it drifts between E and A—but even that overstates the case. It’s more accurate to say that Wilson dismisses the very concept of a fixed tonal center. It is our lesser ears, trying to map otherworldly genius onto a familiar grid, that attempt to pin it down to something so conventional as “the key of E.” Or “the key of A.” It is neither. It is both. It doesn’t move between keys. It exists in multiple tonalities at once—hovering rather than landing.
A typical pop song might use four or five chords, maybe six—all, or most, drawn from the same key. By my count, God Only Knows uses twenty-two. Many are inversions—the very concept Elton John struggled to explain. It uses diminished chords, not in passing, but as foundational harmonic material—something almost unheard of in pop.
And then there’s the instrumentation: sleigh bells, French horn, and the lush, layered harmonies of the Beach Boys’ voices.
All of it—structure, harmony, arrangement, and the lyrics—work in service of something far more ambitious than a simple love song. The words aren’t a seduction. They’re a kind of invocation. A study in the fragility of devotion. An existential contemplation of love, mortality, and the meaning of life.
God Only Knows is an ethereal meditation—floating somewhere between love song and prayer.
Mozart might’ve heard it and thought seriously about a career in used cars.
And now, like Mozart—and Frank Sinatra—Brian Wilson has left us.
What Remains
“Oh Billy! They’re all dying.”
I understand now, Mom.
It seems they are.
In just the last few years, so many of my music idols have died. Sly Stone, Jeff Beck, Roberta Flack, David Crosby, Gordon Lightfoot, Christine McVie.
I knew all my heroes would eventually pass. But somehow, I thought surely Christine McVie would live forever.
I was never the kind of fan of the Beach Boys that my mother was of Frank Sinatra. I was lucky to have grown up during the Golden Age of popular music. My lifetime has been an embarrassment of riches. I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and I’ve seen Eric Clapton in concert five times. And hundreds of shows in between.
I was lucky enough to see the Beach Boys one time, in 1974, during their Endless Summer tour. But Wilson, struggling with alcohol and drugs, was not on stage. He had become a bit of a recluse by that time.
But he was there in spirit. Just as he was on stage with most of the incredible performers I’ve been lucky enough to see over the years. Because Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson are in the DNA of pop music. Music that still reverberates with—and often struggles to live up to—that legacy.
I can’t help but wonder how my life might’ve turned out if, on my second date with the impossibly lovely Debbie Sedore, I’d played God Only Knows instead of whatever disposable pop song was on my eight-track at the time.
Life would’ve still gone on—believe me.
But God only knows.
