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Brian Douglas Wilson (born June 20, 1942) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition, extraordinary musical aptitude, and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, layered vocals, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson is also known for his formerly high-ranged singing and for his lifelong struggles with mental illness. Raised in Hawthorne, California, Wilson's formative influences included George Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach. In 1961, he began his professional career as a member of the Beach Boys, serving as the band's songwriter, producer, co-lead vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, and de facto leader. After signing with Capitol Records in 1962, he became the first pop artist credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. He also produced other acts, most notably the Honeys and American Spring. By the mid-1960s he had written or co-written more than two dozen U.S. Top 40 hits, including the number-ones "Surf City" (1963), "I Get Around" (1964), "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), and "Good Vibrations" (1966). He is considered among the first music producer auteurs and the first rock producers to apply the studio as an instrument. In 1964, Wilson had a nervous breakdown and resigned from regular concert touring to focus on songwriting and production, leading to works such as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and his first credited solo release, "Caroline, No" (both 1966), as well as the unfinished album Smile. As he declined professionally and psychologically in the late 1960s, his contributions to the band diminished, and legends grew around his lifestyle of seclusion, overeating, and drug abuse. His first comeback, divisive among fans, yielded the would-be solo effort The Beach Boys Love You (1977). In the 1980s, he formed a controversial creative and business partnership with his psychologist, Eugene Landy, and relaunched his solo career with the self-titled album Brian Wilson (1988). Wilson disassociated from Landy in 1991 and went on to tour regularly as a solo artist from 1999 to 2022. Heralding popular music's recognition as an art form, Wilson's accomplishments as a producer helped initiate an era of unprecedented creative autonomy for label-signed acts. The youth culture of the 1960s is commonly associated with his early songs, and he is regarded as an important figure to many music genres and movements, including the California sound, art pop, psychedelia, chamber pop, progressive music, punk, outsider, and sunshine pop. Since the 1980s, his influence has extended to styles such as post-punk, indie rock, emo, dream pop, Shibuya-kei, and chillwave. Wilson's accolades include numerous industry awards, inductions into multiple music halls of fame, and entries on several "greatest of all time" critics' rankings. His life was dramatized in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy. 1942–1961: Background and musical training Childhood Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20, 1942, at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood, California, the first child of Audree Neva (née Korthof) and Murry Wilson, a machinist who later pursued songwriting part-time. His ancestry includes Dutch, Scottish, English, German, Irish, and Swedish origins. Wilson's two younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, were born in 1944 and 1946. Shortly after Dennis' birth, the family moved from Inglewood to 3701 West 119th Street in nearby Hawthorne, California. Wilson, along with his siblings, suffered psychological and sporadic physical maltreatment from their father. His 2016 memoir characterizes his father as "violent" and "cruel"; however, it also suggests that certain narratives about the mistreatment had been overstated or unfounded. From an early age, Wilson exhibited an unusually high aptitude for learning by ear. His father remembered how, after hearing only a few verses of "When the Caissons Go Rolling Along", the infant Wilson was able to reproduce its melody. Murry was a driving force in cultivating his children's musical talents. Wilson undertook six weeks of accordion lessons, and by ages seven and eight, he performed choir solos at church. His choir director declared him to have perfect pitch. When Wilson was 12 years old, his family acquired an upright piano, and he then shifted his focus from accordion. He began teaching himself to play piano by spending hours mastering his favorite songs. He learned how to write manuscript music through a friend of his father. Wilson sang with peers at school functions, as well as with family and friends at home, and guided his two brothers in learning harmony parts, which they would rehearse together. He also played piano obsessively after school, deconstructing the harmonies of the Four Freshmen by listening to short segments of their songs on a phonograph, then working to recreate the blended sounds note by note on the keyboard. Moreover, Wilson owned an educational record titled The Instruments of the Orchestra and was a regular listener of KFWB, his favorite radio station at the time. Carl introduced him to R&B, and their uncle Charlie taught him boogie-woogie piano. Both brothers would frequently stay up listening to Johnny Otis' KFOX radio show, deliberating over its R&B tracks and incorporating them into their musical lexicon. Carl remarked that by the age of 10, Wilson "could play great boogie-woogie piano!" Carl remembered the numerous years when Wilson's life revolved solely around listening to Four Freshmen records and playing the piano for extensive periods. Dennis portrayed his elder brother as a "freak" who preferred listening to records over activities like baseball. One of Wilson's first forays into songwriting, penned on paper when he was nine, was a reinterpretation of the lyrics to Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susannah". In his 1991 memoir, he recalls writing his first song for a 4th grade school project concerning Paul Bunyan. In a 2005 interview, he said that he began composing original music in 1955, when he was 12. High school and college In high school, Wilson played quarterback for Hawthorne High's football team, played baseball for American Legion Ball, and ran cross-country in his senior year. At 15, he briefly worked part-time sweeping at a jewelry store, his only paid employment before his success in music. He also cleaned for his father's machining company, ABLE, on weekends. Wilson auditioned to sing for the Original Sound Record Company's inaugural record release, "Chapel of Love" (unrelated to the 1964 song), but was deemed too young. For his 16th birthday, he received a portable two-track Wollensak tape recorder, allowing him to experiment w.... Discover the Brian Leaf popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Brian Leaf books.