June 17, 2025, 2:22pm
Photo from brianwilson.com
Beach Boy Brian Wilson, the American genius and big time Norbit fan, passed away last week. He wrote some of the greatest pop songs of all time, and to honor the departed musician, I’ve curated a playlist/reading list of tunes and books to pack along the next time you’re heading to the beach.
Listen to: “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Let’s start with this classic, early ‘60s ear worm. It’s pretty saccharine though—why not temper it with something on the darker side of surfing?
Pair with: William Finnegan’s memoir Barbarian Days will make you want to experience Finnegan’s ecstatic connection to surfing, and also fear the extremes of surf culture. I like to imagine the “ride the barrel and get pitted” guy was on the Pulitzer committee for this one.
Nothing says “surfing” and “USA” like sadistic beach freaks and crazed ‘Nam vets. Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source is a fun, feverish, sand-blasted noir that inspired Point Break, one of the top movies in the Boyfriend Film Canon.
Listen to: “Help Me Rhonda” This deceptively sunny tune has some real heaviness beneath it: the deep guitars, the low “bow oh oh”s, and the rejected narrator pitching a weird love triangle. There are plenty of books out there about love triangles and men begging woman to sleep with them, going all the way back to The Aeneid’s self-serving lover boy, but how might Rhonda feel?
Pair with: Lise from Tove Ditlevsen’s Faces is a quintessential heartsick and confused character to me, who is looking for some relief too. I think Lise might see herself in the opening lines: “Well, since she put me down I’ve been out doin’ in my head/I come in late at night and in the mornin’ I just lay in bed.”
Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby features another complex romantic entanglement, with characters after solace and love, and where everyone’s begging to “help me get her out of my heart.”
Listen to: “God Only Knows”
Pair with: One of the greatest songs of all time needs to be paired with one of the greatest books of all time: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Both are sweeping, reflective, hopeful, and appealing to a higher power: put these two American masterpieces in conversation.
Listen to: “Good Vibrations” What sticks out to me about “Good Vibrations” is how strangely patchwork it is: there are so many small compositions and moments that fit together in this trippy love song. I also love the invented word “excitations” here, a neologism that doesn’t seem to have caught on.
Pair with: This song reminds me of two dreamy and inventive short story collections: The Miniature Wife by Manuel Gonzales, which features a plane that circles for years and a man who speaks from his ears. and the smart horror in The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, with stories of a spider-man in Europe and a feminist revolution. Both are as weird and beautiful as Wilson’s song.
Listen to: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” Relationships are hard. Lyrically, this song is pretty simple, but the complexity of the musical arrangement elevates it to something more than just a ditty about teenage puppy love. This is a song about belonging, about imagining a future with someone, and feeling the pang of the distance between where you are and where you hope to be.
Pair with: Naturally, this sends me to a book about finding love in very new places: Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy. Like the song, Sky Daddy is strange, sweet, and full of deep longing. Unlike the song though, this one features horniness for jet planes.
And if we’re talking about Californians striving for a better world, a “world where we belong,” Mike Davis’ City of Quartz has to be in the conversation.
Listen to: “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” Brian Wilson was a man who struggled, and I think probably felt pretty out of step much of the time. But there isn’t much bitterness in this song, and like many Beach Boys songs, the complexity of the music complicate the meaning. This is a lament for something that is out of reach, almost strange to the narrator.
Pair with: When I think of characters who are “looking for a place to fit in” and who “got brains but they ain’t doing…no good,” I think of the great Kobo Abe‘s books. Particularly, the man and woman in The Woman in the Dunes, and The Box Man from The Box Man, who dons a large cardboard box, retreating into a strange reality all his own.
Sometimes if the world is too strange and frightening, we have to find ways to make something new. Rest in peace, Brian.
