Best Ever
Music Biography?

The problem with writing about Brian Wilson is that Brian Wilson has already told you everything and nothing. The interviews exist—thousands of hours across six decades—but Wilson’s relationship to his own history resembles his relationship to SMiLE: fragmentary, recursive, perpetually incomplete. He’ll describe the Pet Sounds sessions with technical precision, then attribute the album’s emotional content to voices only he can hear. He’ll discuss his father’s abuse matter-of-factly, then retreat into non sequiturs about health food and cars. The man who wrote “God Only Knows” seems genuinely uncertain what that song means, or meant, or whether meaning is the relevant category at all.

Tom Leaf’s God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson solves this problem by not trying to solve it. Rather than imposing a biographical narrative on Wilson’s life, Leaf assembles an oral history—dozens of voices arranged contrapuntally, speaking across and sometimes against each other. The effect is less like reading a book than like standing in the middle of a party where everyone’s discussing the same absent friend, and you’re slowly triangulating toward a truth none of them possess individually.

The voices range predictably from bandmates (the surviving Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks, the various Pet Sounds and SMiLE collaborators) to music-industry figures who witnessed Wilson’s various rises and collapses. But Leaf’s editorial intelligence shows in his inclusion of less expected perspectives: a nurse from one of Wilson’s psychiatric hospitalizations, a Radiant Radish health-food store employee, the engineer who worked on the abandoned Adult/Child sessions, neighbors from the Bel Air house during the lost years. Each offers a partial view; none claims authority.

The structure mirrors Wilson’s own creative process. Leaf doesn’t proceed chronologically but thematically, organizing testimony around albums, relationships, crises, and recoveries in a way that allows rhymes across decades. A chapter on “Heroes and Villains” will cut from 1966 recording sessions to 2004’s SMiLE reconstruction to Wilson’s 2019 reflections on whether the song was ever truly finished. The effect disorients productively: you lose the ability to locate Wilson’s “real” story in any single period, which turns out to be the point. Brian Wilson exists in superposition, simultaneously the confident young genius of 1966, the bedridden recluse of 1975, the struggling comeback artist of 1988, and the elder statesman of today.

What emerges most powerfully is the collaborative nature of Wilson’s achievement—something individual-genius narratives typically obscure. The Pet Sounds sessions come alive through the recollections of Wrecking Crew members who describe Wilson’s scoring techniques: how he’d sing instrumental parts directly to musicians, sometimes inventing notation on the spot to capture sounds he heard only internally. The SMiLE material gains depth through Van Dyke Parks’s rueful acknowledgment that he never fully understood what Wilson was attempting, just that it seemed more important than anything he’d been involved with before or since. Even Eugene Landy, Wilson’s controversial therapist, receives nuanced treatment—several voices acknowledge that whatever ethical boundaries Landy crossed, he also returned Wilson to functional life when no one else could.

Leaf’s editorial hand is lightest precisely where other biographers would bear down: the question of Wilson’s mental illness. Rather than diagnosing from a distance, Leaf allows contradictory accounts to coexist. Some voices describe psychosis; others suggest Wilson was simply too sensitive for the music industry’s brutality. Several note that the drugs didn’t help, but disagree about which drugs or how much. Wilson himself, in contemporary interviews woven throughout, discusses his condition with a strange detachment, as if describing weather patterns in a region he used to live in.

The book’s title, of course, references the song—a song that Paul McCartney called the greatest ever written, that sits at the heart of popular music’s ongoing argument about the relationship between craft and emotion. But it also functions as epistemological thesis: when it comes to Brian Wilson, God only knows. The rest of us can only assemble our partial views and hope the harmonies converge.

What distinguishes God Only Knows from the crowded field of Wilson/Beach Boys literature (David Leaf’s earlier work, Peter Ames Carlin’s comprehensive biography, various band memoirs of varying reliability) is this formal innovation. Leaf has made a book that sounds like Brian Wilson’s music: densely layered, emotionally overwhelming, resistant to easy resolution. You finish it understanding less about Brian Wilson than you thought you knew—which means you finally understand something true.

Decide for Yourself:

• The hardcover first edition includes a comprehensive index and several photographs not reproduced in later printings.
• The audiobook version features multiple voice actors representing different interview subjects—a formal choice that honors the book’s oral-history structure.
• Pair with the Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary Box Set for the full experience—hearing the session tapes while reading the musicians’ recollections creates a kind of stereophonic understanding.