Pop music has a mysterious and undeniable hold over listeners. Faithful fans can chart the history of their lives through specific songs, and those songs don’t necessarily have to have been major chart-topping hits. In fact, sometimes the more obscure tunes bear the stronger emotional load because listeners don’t feel like they are sharing the power of those particular songs with others. Those more meaningful songs don’t belong to everyone.
While riding the waves during a recent screening of Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy — the new biopic exploring two significant periods in the life of Brian Wilson, the studio wizard behind the Psychedelic Pop symphonic sound of The Beach Boys — I experienced a subtle yet momentarily surprising disconnect. The film tinkers with the boilerplate framing of most traditional biopics, creating two parallel threads in Wilson’s life for audiences to follow and casting two very different actors to inhabit those points.
Paul Dano embodies the younger Wilson, the Pop maestro, as he steps away from his bandmates and the rigors of constantly touring to wrestle with the musical cacophony in his head that leads to Pet Sounds. During this phase, Wilson first starts to become aware of how unsettling the sounds and voices in his head can be. But then, when we encounter Wilson 20 years later in the 1980s, John Cusack has taken over. He wanders through life under the near-complete control of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who has sapped much of the great man’s passion in an effort to make him a more stable and productive regular person. The performances, as astonishing and unique as they are, especially in capturing the sad state of this musical genius, tend to fade ever so slightly into the background as the music swells.
It was when I began to listen carefully to the music and pay attention to the creative process on display that I found myself in a bit of a loop. Pet Sounds, released in 1966, begat two singles — “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”/“God Only Knows” — that are instantly familiar and likely, for Boomers, have hazy summertime memories attached to them. Although these songs pre-date me (and I am admittedly far from being a Beach Boys fan), I recognize “God Only Knows” as quite possibly one of the greatest Pop tunes ever written.
Pohlad’s film grants us access to the step-by-step development of the song, starting with Dano’s Wilson at the piano playing it for his father. It would be easy to call what we hear at this point haunting, but this is like watching an architect laying the foundation for a skyscraper that will one day point a single finger to the heavens. Wilson begins to fill in the details, telling his father what will come. And then Pohlad brings us into the studio to watch as the song rises up, piece by piece.
The real marvel at work during this construction phase is Atticus Ross, the film’s composer, who assumed a challenge that was in some ways more complex than the parallel storylines. How do you write music for a film about Brian Wilson? Do you dare to create original works that will inevitably be compared to his? Or do you use his sounds, reconfiguring them into something that feels fresh and new, even though it is decades old?
Ross, like me, wasn’t alive when the singles from Pet Sounds hit the airwaves, but during a recent phone interview he spoke of how The Beach Boys and their music are “ingrained in one’s consciousness. You know, the universal consciousness.” Plus his father started a pirate radio station in England and later a record label, so Ross grew up in and around 1960s music. “So whether I consciously knew it or not, I knew The Beach Boys,” Ross says. “And growing up, Pet Sounds was music that you couldn’t ignore. It was a certified masterpiece.”
So, again, the challenge stands monumentally before Ross. Once he overcame his initial hesitancy to take on the project, Ross discussed the idea of seeing Wilson as an ever-present musical figure who, if he was willing, could turn over his masters, allowing Ross “to sample or re-tune portions” for the score “or whatever kind of adventure” this process would become. In other words, this was not going to be a traditional approach of song snippets appended to scenes.
And as Ross and Pohlad flesh out the creation of “God Only Knows,” it clearly achieves a degree of wondrous grace, perfectly marrying sound and vision inspired by Wilson’s genius. A documentary could have given us the facts and the details, but this creative team gave life to the spirit and a higher truth that would have been otherwise unheard.
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