Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys and a foundational presence in the development of modern music, has died at the age of 82. “We are at a loss for words right now,” his family wrote in a statement. “Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.” After Wilson’s wife Melinda Wilson died in 2024, Wilson was placed under a conservatorship due to a neurocognitive disorder and a dementia diagnosis, per the New York Times. Wilson’s business manager LeeAnn Hard and his publicist and manager Jean Sievers served as co-conservators.
Wilson, an early musical prodigy who was born in 1942 in Inglewood, was best known as a founding member of the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys began as the Pendletones — a group that included Wilson, his two brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love, and classmate Al Jardine — and released their first single, “Surfin’,” in 1961, which reached No. 75 on the Billboard sales chart. The group’s name was changed to the Beach Boys upon the song’s release. Their first album, Surfin’ Safari, was released in October 1962, which leaned into a harmonious and breezy “California pop” sound — a genre that the band mastered for several years with hits such as “Fun Fun Fun,” “California Girls,” and “I Get Around.”
The arrival of 1966’s Pet Sounds, however, changed the trajectory of pop music as we know it. Spearheaded by Wilson, he became the idiosyncratic architect for new ways to approach studio production and how newer, more sophisticated techniques could enhance the recording process. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows,” Pet Sounds’s enduring songs, have become standards in the American music canon. Wilson’s ear, Bob Dylan once joked, should be donated to the Smithsonian Museum. “I wanted to write joyful music that made other people feel good,” Wilson said at the Beach Boys’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988.
Wilson entered a period of relative seclusion following the auteur triumph of Pet Sounds, which included a highly publicized and controversial business relationship with the psychologist Eugene Landy. His life and career — as well as his lifelong struggles with mental illness — were reexamined in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy, a portrayal that Wilson and his family supported. As to whether Wilson considered himself a genius, though, we’ll let him explain it himself. “Genius is a big word,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. “But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.”
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The Beach Boys co-founder was a pillar of modern singing and songwriting.
