Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson died this week, aged 82, and the music experts at Billboard have taken a look back at the band’s greatest hits.
A team at the American music magazine, led by awards editor Paul Grein, ranked the iconic bands hits form the sixties and beyond.
Grein said Wilson, who had been living with dementia in recent years, initially made the Beach Boys a band for all seasons with a handful of iconic West Coast classics of the beach and the open road.
“Then, he vertically expanded the possibilities of pop music with soaring pocket symphonies that captured the yearning, confusion and overall emotional overflow of youth with a somewhat frightening clarity,” he said.
“And then he ventured into the unknown, sprawling out with studio works so ambitious even he couldn’t quite get his arms totally around them, but which still achieved the sublime in their disarray.”
Grein sad any one of these periods would’ve been enough to ensure Wilson’s place in rock history, “but the combination of them guarantees him and his Beach Boys catalogue absolute immortality”.
Here are Billboard’s top 20 Beach Boy songs:
- God Only Knows.
- Good Vibrations.
- Don’t Worry Baby.
- I Get Around.
- California Girls.
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice.
- When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).
- Caroline, No.
- I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.
- Wild Honey.
- Fun, Fun, Fun.
- Surfer Girl.
- She Knows Me Too Well.
- Surf’s Up.
- Help Me Rhonda.
- Little Saint Nick.
- In My Room.
- Sail On, Sailor.
- You Still Believe in Me.
- Surfin’ USA.
