Brian Wilson never cared to be called a genius over every record. It was enough for him that he wrote songs people enjoyed, and he hoped they'd be remembered the way he remembered classic tracks from his childhood. At the same time, though, he knew exactly who was a cut above the rest in pop music. Far Out Magazine ↗
He himself would have been the first to admit that without Phil Spector, he wouldn't exist either. And everything stopped for him whenever he heard a new Beatles record — John Lennon and Paul McCartney fed him chords that didn't fit the standard pop structure, and Wilson felt a rivalry that, in his own words, he had no chance of winning. Far Out Magazine ↗
But it wasn't just two songwriters behind that. If the Beatles were meant to have five members, George Martin would have been among them — and Wilson found that out firsthand when Martin made his own arrangement of his God Only Knows. "I told him he scored a better mix than I did on the original. It was a lesson from a brilliant man and producer. I loved what he did with The Beatles. And I loved him as a person. We got along great. When he passed away in 2016, I was really broken up. He was one of the true greats." Far Out Magazine ↗
Wilson died on June 11, 2025, at the age of 82. The praise he gave Martin is all the more striking coming from a man whose own studio methods are still dissected today in just as much detail as Martin's — and who nonetheless admitted without hesitation that his most famous ballad could be mixed better by someone else.
Illustration photo: Brian Wilson in January 2007. Photo: Richard King / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
Brian Wilson called George Martin one of the true greats
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