Harmony In My Head: The Music That Inspired The Genius Of Brian Wilson Various

Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys was one of the greatest songwriters and arrangers of all time.
He was inspired in his art by the music of The Four Freshmen, George Gershwin and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Wilson deployed these forces to create one of the most significant albums of the 60s, 'Pet Sounds'.

By the mid-1960s, the more adventurous pop groups on both sides of the Atlantic were gravitating from singles to albums as the natural format of expression; the LP offering the ideal medium for pushing commercial and creative limits. The key release of 1966 was The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds', a lush homage to Californian adolescence, consciously created by leader Brian Wilson as a riposte to The Beatles' 'Rubber Soul'. The Beatles were deeply impressed. Declaring 'Pet Sounds' to be "the album of all time", Paul McCartney conceded that they would need to surpass anything they had previously done to equal it artistically.

Late in 1964, Wilson had announced a retreat from public performance. He remained at home in order to craft a more poetic, ambitious style of songwriting and production, determined as he was to advance to (and surpass) 'Rubber Soul's deeper, more eclectic sound world.

Wilson saw 'Pet Sounds' not as a collection of tracks, but as a song cycle, an entity in itself. Its creation would necessarily be influenced by the music with which Brian had become enthralled; the innovative vocal harmonies of the Four Freshmen that he had studied intently in his early teens; the panoramic style of George Gershwin, who in the 1920s had embodied the new sophistication of American popular song; and the musical universe of Johann Sebastian Bach, master of counterpoint, whose vast body of work contained the technical prowess and emotional depth which Brian aspired to.

The art of The Four Freshmen, Gershwin and Bach that captivated Brian is presented here, the first music he remembers hearing: 'Rhapsody In Blue' that epitomises New York City in the jazz age; his introduction to the Four Freshmen, 'Day By Day, heard on his mother's car radio, and, in its entirety, Brian's first LP purchase 'The Four Freshmen And Five Trombones'; along with such Bach works as the cantata 'Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring', that inspired 'California Girls'.