Click the link to read the obituary on The New York Times website (Ben Sisario). Here’s an excerpt:
June 11, 2025
Brian Wilson, who as the leader and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys became rock’s poet laureate of surf-and-sun innocence, but also an embodiment of damaged genius through his struggles with mental illness and drugs, has died. He was 82…On mid-1960s hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys created a musical counterpart to the myth of Southern California as paradise — a soundtrack of cheerful harmonies and a boogie beat to accompany a lifestyle of youthful leisure. Cars, sex and rolling waves were the only cares. That vision, manifested in Mr. Wilson’s crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. During its clean-cut heyday of 1962 to 1966, the group landed 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10. Three of them went to No. 1: “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.”…At the same time, the round-faced, soft-spoken Mr. Wilson — who didn’t surf — became one of pop’s most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs, crafting complex and innovative productions that awed his peers.
“That ear,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.”
Mr. Wilson’s masterpiece was the 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” a wistful song cycle that he directed in elaborate recording sessions, blending the sound of a rock band with classical instrumentation and oddities like the Electro-Theremin, whose otherworldly whistle Mr. Wilson would use again on “Good Vibrations.” “Pet Sounds” was a commercial disappointment upon its release, but the technical sophistication and melancholic depth of tracks like “God Only Knows” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”eventually led critics and fellow musicians to honor it as an epochal achievement. In both 2003 and 2020, Rolling Stone ranked “Pet Sounds” No. 2 on its list of the greatest albums of all time. (No. 1 was the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 2003, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” in 2020.)