Back in 2013, in my Idol Musings blog devoted to the TV show, I wrote about the Beach Boys song Good Vibrations. The context was Final 6 Week, and the Idolists had two themes to perform: the Burt Bacharach-Hal David Song Book and Songs You Wish You Wrote. Here’s what I wrote about the latter. Rest in Peace, Brian Wilson.
As to the song I wished I wrote, I had to think about how I would decide that since I’m neither a singer nor a songwriter. Eventually, I decided that I would want to write a song that displayed some form of wizardry that had never been in any other song before and that other songwriters would look at as a landmark innovation. That made the choice of the song I wished I wrote easy – The Beach Boys Good Vibrations.
With this 1966 song, Brian Wilson was credited for first using the recording studio as an instrument. Over a period of several months, Wilson, the other Beach Boys, and dozens of studio musicians recorded and re-recorded seemingly unrelated musical and vocal sections for the song. Wilson then edited and mixed these pieces into the iconic track. There were reportedly seventeen recording sessions at four different recording studios before 90 hours of tape were edited and mixed down to three minutes and 35 seconds!1
The technical innovations and recording process of this song changed the way music would be made forever. Good Vibrations became the inspiration for the Beatles’ song A Day In the Life as well as the process Paul McCartney has said they used in making Sgt. Pepper, widely regarded as the greatest rock album in history.
Besides the innovative recording process, the song musically and lyrically is gorgeous. The beautiful lead vocals, the elegant harmonies, the memorable chorus, the crazy bass line, which then leads into those bizarre sounds that take the song to the fadeout, all add up to what I call a symphony in three and a half minutes.
And, oh, by the way, those “bizarre sounds” were made by a new instrument called an Electro-Theremin. It was first used just before Good Vibrations on another Beach Boys song, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.
This would be an impossible song for any one person to sing, whether on Idol or anywhere else. But I so wish that I had the creativity, vision, and talent to have written it.
Ray's Musings 
Leave a comment