Brian Wilson: The Barenaked Ladies's Portrait of Loneliness
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of Anxiety Disorders, Disordered Eating, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, and Schizoaffective Disorders
Have you ever felt alone? I mean, really alone? The kind of alone where the thought of laying in bed and hibernating for years on end not only seems reasonable, but necessary? That's exactly what Brian Wilson, the genius behind The Beach Boys, did. Burnt out on drugs, drink, and failed attempts to produce a follow up to his magnum opus, Wilson retreated to bed for three years. He only left his bed to go to the kitchen for his meals. Eventually his mental decline worsened for the next two decades and new work and public appearances from the greatest producer-musician of the 20th century became increasingly rare. Coinciding with Wilson's reemergence into the musical sphere during the 1990s, Canadian Rock band The Barenaked Ladies released the song, 'Brian Wilson'. Using the cultural caché and public fascination surrounding Wilson's wilderness years, BNL's song explores how Wilson's story represents the razor thin line that many people suffering from anxiety, obsessive, or schizoaffective disorders straddle throughout their lives. Steven Page, the song's author, navigates the listener through a psycho-dynamic world wherein these disorders warp simple pleasures into the kind of isolating and dangerous symptoms of a mental state in complete and petrifying disarray.
I love The Beach Boys. In 2021, this is not a particularly daring opinion. Saying that Pet Sounds (1966) is my favourite album, and that I own multiple copies on multiple different formats is borderline redundant. It's like saying you love Citizen Kane, or that you think Paradise Lost is pretty neat. The Beach Boys don't need me to fly their flag. No one wants to read a spirited 'defence' of Smiley Smile (1967) or a complete history of the album that eventually became, Brian Wilson Presents: Smile (2004), and, Smile Sessions (2011). There are more than enough books and documentaries already covering that. I won't even be going into a spirited revaluation of the band's early Surf Rock, now looked down on with a sneering contempt for its perceived naivety and cheese factor. If you want someone to explain to you why Summer Days (1965) is excellent, may I recommend the wonderful, Why The Beach Boys Matter (2018), by Tom Smucker. Smucker does a far greater job of contextualising The Beach Boys within the music world of the early 1960s better than I ever could.
Fundamentally, this isn't an article about The Beach Boys. It's barely going to be about Brian Wilson. It's about a song that uses Wilson, one of the most singular, unique, and troubling stories in popular music, as a centre of gravity for a discussion intensely personal experiences of anxiety, obsession, and loneliness.
Before hearing 'Brian Wilson' I had no prior attachment to The Barenaked Ladies. I'd heard of them, but I hadn't listened to them. Music is like that most of the time. This was the case until a few weeks ago when this song had slipped itself in the middle of a Blues Traveller mix playlist; as if it was waiting for me to find it. I'd just recently watched Love and Mercy (2014) and the Jungian in me couldn't help diving into that synchronicity. In the weeks since, I must have listened to the song more than a hundred times. I find it kind of breathtaking to listen to. Not just because of its subject matter, but also in the manner it manages to achieve a Pop-Rock perfection whilst engaging in subject matter which is so dark and uncomfortable. It's the kind of mental breakdown you can dance to or you'll hear on commercial radio. I think that's why the song is, to me, so compelling. It has an underlying explosive mania, pulling in several conflicting directions. Its ability to maintain cohesion whilst shredding itself apart is awe inspiring. This is a song that is worthy of analysis and worthy of your time. So, let's take a closer look at what 'Brian Wilson' is actually doing beyond its catchy hooks, high energy rhythms, and extended bass solos.
The song opens with the vocal line:
Drove downtown in the rain,
Nine-thirty on a Tuesday night,
Just to check out the late night record shop.
Call it impulsive, call it compulsive, call it insane.
When I'm surrounded I just can't stop
Here lies the crux of the song's main idea. Page, armed with his acoustic guitar, begins by revealing the intimate details of the speaker's weekly ritual. The ritual isn't pleasant, in fact, it is a ritual driven by unpleasantness. Tuesday is a significant day in Canadian music culture because it is the day new releases hit the store shelves. A time of pilgrimage for any avid music fan. People who are obsessed with music live for the next opportunity to get their hands on the next album or single. Everything from long awaited projects to hidden gems with interesting covers and titles reveal themselves in that one moment. Finding new albums, for the devotee, is an experience that exists in the space between fetish and holy communion. Notice, however, that the song's protagonist deliberately saves his weekly pilgrimage for the safety of the 'late-night' store. He drives out in the kind of conditions that would keep others away because it provides him with a quality of solitude that makes the experience into a private endeavour. No one has to know that this is how he spends his time, lurking the aisles and racks, feeding his conditioned desire. The speaker has constructed a system which both feeds into the repetitive and compulsive desire to buy records, whilst also keeping him away from the social aspects of musical engagement. But the speaker also knows that this constructed world isn't positive or helpful. There's a gagging sensation in the repetition of the 'call it', as though, in acknowledging that he is acting out of 'compulsion', the speaker is choking one the shame of being unable to control himself. According to Brian Lesser at, dualdiagnosis.org, compulsive rituals are often engaged in by people suffering from anxiety disorders as a means to alleviate fears. These rituals then become problematic because they don't provide permanent relief from the cause of anxiety, especially if they are self-isolating in practice. The speaker is aware that the record store is part of an anxiety relieving ritual (that anxiety being a sense of social claustrophobia) and he is also aware about how the ritual appears to onlookers (impulsive, compulsive, and insane). Yet he simply cannot stop himself. He cannot stop because he is caught in a cycle wherein purchasing new music alleviates whatever it is that is driving his anxious disorder just long enough for the next new releases to hit the shelves. Steven Page writes this protagonist as someone completely losing control of their own functions. They are lost in the whirlwind of their own disordered behaviour. They understand it; they intellectualise it; but they are ultimately helpless in the face of it. He continues:
It's a matter of instinct, a matter of conditioning, a matter of fact,
You can call me Pavlov's Dog,
Ring a bell and I'll salivate.
That repetition of phrase occurs again. This echoing of the prior 'call it' within the 'matter of' ties the two lines together and creates a sense that what is impulsive and compulsive emerges out of a combination of unconscious stimulation and a forced conditioning by some external source. It is observable, you can 'call it' whatever you like, but fundamentally the action is 'a matter of' the solidified hardwiring of his brain. Once again, we see this urge to sooth the reaction caused by the subject's feeling of entrapment. Reinforcing this assumption is the song's first external reference and the only one that isn't in some way related to Brian Wilson. Page has the narrator compare himself to Pavlov's Dog. Pavlov's Dog is a famous psychological experiment carried out by Russian psychiatrist Ivan Pavlov during the late 19th century. The experiment discovered that dogs, upon picking up on the stimuli associated with their receiving food, would begin to salivate. This discovery posited that involuntary responses could be triggered by stimuli that the subject has been exposed to and has begun to associate with that response. Or, as Steven Page puts it; 'ring a bell and I'll salivate'. Of course, this is only a very simplified explanation, I'm sure my friends in the Sciences are already on their way to knock down my door in righteous (and well deserved) fury. When the song's narrator refers to themselves as being Pavlov's Dog they are framing themselves as the subject of intense conditioning which has completely reconfigured their ability to behave reasonably. They are subservient to their comforting compulsions. They move through engrained motions simply to gain some measure of self-control over their situation. If this sounds like addiction to you, it's probably because the border between obsessive compulsive tendencies and addiction is thin. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America estimates that 20% of OCD sufferers also struggle with some form of substance abuse. I'm not saying an addiction to the ritualisation of the weekly purchasing of new music is the same as an addiction to dangerous substances, but I believe that the way we discuss addiction and compulsion could be better served by understanding them as being driven by similar patterns of thought. The American Addiction Centre even highlights 'obsessive and compulsive' individuals as being high risk cases for addiction disorders because of their low level of impulse control. If the speaker is unable to control their impulsive urge to buy music, and it is the only thing which provides them with mental comfort, and they are also using the act of buying and listening as a means of social withdrawal, then we must understand that this seemingly normal hobby has become harmful to the mental and social wellbeing of the speaker. The most insidious of dangers arise from pleasures, especially from the ones which don't signal physical harm or appear abnormal.
After the chorus line: 'I'm lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did' the whole of the band charge into the mix, driving the song forward with drums, double bass, and a secondary guitar. But Page's character continues to describe their strange insular gaze and isolationist behaviour.
So I'm lying here, just staring at the ceiling tiles
And I'm thinking 'bout, oh what to think about.
Just listening and re-listening to Smiley Smile,
And wondering if this is some kind of creative drought.
This verse represents loneliness in its most mechanical mode. It, once again. exposes an impulse towards repetition that emerges out of a response to mental illness. However you choose to listen to music, be that on a physical or digital format, there exists a physical relationship between yourself and the music. You are the one who presses play, hits shuffle, places the needle on the record, rewinds the tape, ect. Every song or album you listen to is a choice you make when you're alone. What Steven Page does in this section is focus on how that physical relationship manifests when the duelling forces of loneliness and anxiety force an individual into an emotional retreat. There's something soothing about the repetitive motion involved with allowing a side of vinyl to play through before picking the needle up and setting it back to the start. It becomes a kind of physical fixation. It scratches the itch in your brain. Many hours of my own life have been lost to staring at ceiling and playing the instrumental B-side to David Bowie's Low (1977) in a hypnotic loop. It's that dissociative capacity that music allows blending in with a repetitive motion that creates its own ritual. And when all you have to think about is finding what to think about then you need the psycho-spatial soundtrack to fill the left over space. For the song's narrator, this soundtrack is The Beach Boy's Smiley Smile, the strange, psychedelic, and often impenetrable follow up to Pet Sounds and the project which marks the starting point of Brian Wilson's psychological decline. This reference isn't by accident. Page knows what he's doing by invoking Smiley Smile. It is a monument to creative disruption and the damage done when it starts to feel like you're operating on a different frequency to the rest of the planet and the rest of the planet starts pushing back. It marks the point at which The Beach Boys began to reject Brian's creative intensions, and the start of the mental decline which would define the next three decades of his life. It's not insignificant that Page shows the listener two conflicting images: one where the speaker visits the record store on new release day; and another where he shows us the narrator listening to listening to the same album over and over again. The speaker doesn't actually care about the new music beyond the numbing balm of the ritual. If he did he wouldn't keep returning to Smiley Smile. He returns to Smiley Smile because it is, in a lot of ways, the soundtrack to the collapse of an individual's grip on the consensus reality of the people who surround them. Smiley Smile signals the start of a complete detachment from the shared mutual understanding and recognition of personhood that human interaction is built on. Smiley Smile, marks the moment where the tide swept the once mighty force of Brian Wilson away. Smiley Smile is incomplete, self-sabotaging, sporadically magnificent, haunting, and haunted - sublime in its tragedy. Going back to Smiley Smile, and playing it on loop in a situation you've intellectualised as a 'creative drought' is like returning to the scene of the crime. The crime of failure. The crime of being so crippled under the weight of your own self-expectation that you find yourself retreating to bed in the hope that tomorrow you'll crack it, only to find out that years have fled past and you've barely moved an inch.
The song's 4th section is possibly my favourite of the whole piece. I've struggled to work out how exactly to label it, it's in a different key, but I think the term 'bridge' more accurately describes the section which proceeds it. What it does echo however, is the 'episodic interludes' (tape splices) that we hear in the middle of Good Vibrations. Thus, in keeping with the spirit of the piece, that's how we'll refer to it. Episodic interlude #1 is the section of the song which I find to be the most moving:
And if you wanna find me, I'll be out in the sandbox
Wondering where the hell all the love is gone.
I'm playing my guitar and building castles in the sun,
And singing, 'Fun, Fun, Fun'.
The interlude's beauty is in its innocence and its image of pristine serenity, yes, but even more so in its imperfect and broken vision. Even in the moment of peace there is a feeling that the past is even more special, even more simple, even more beautiful than whatever is being felt in the moment. The present moment is a mere mimicry of the past. To provide a bit of context: the reference to the sandbox is literal. Brian Wilson, during the Pet Sounds/Smile era had a sandpit installed in his living room and he had his piano moved into it. And, without psychoanalysing Wilson, or the song, one cannot overlook the obvious reading that this represents a psychological regression into childhood (I've read reports that this was even its intended function). It is literally taking work and putting it into the environment of play. The narrator, mimicking Wilson, or imagining themselves as Wilson, is finding an escape from the exile imposed on them by their anxiety disorders into an environment which is more playful, malleable, and magical. Why, when the world is crushing itself against you, wouldn't you choose to replace it with a space that allows for an infinite amount of control and comfort? Well, Page seemingly answers that in this verse too. In making reference to the 1964 single 'Fun, Fun, Fun', the writer is acknowledging that, whilst calming, the desire to retreat into nostalgia and childish play is the narrator replacing one cage with another. Sure, it's fun to build sandcastles in your sandbox and play the old hits that remind you of the good times, but it won't make you feel better. It doesn't answer the question of where all the love has gone. In retreating into the sandbox you are merely ignoring the issues, replacing them with temporary pleasure. Eventually, however, you must choose to leave the sandbox and confront the reason why you feel that the 'love is gone'. You can embrace it though. The sandbox and reality do not have to exist in conflict, but can form their own harmony within a healthy mind. Brian Wilson opened his 2000 album, Live at the Roxy Theatre, with a cappella cover of specifically this episode of the song. I don't think it's coincidence that this is the moment in the song that he settled on specifically. It's both, simultaneously, the song's more specific and most universal reference. It focuses on a snapshot in Wilson's life that is so specifically his whilst also straddling the same kind of emotional disharmony that haunts our everyday lives. Even in our most cherished fantasies there is always this inescapable fear that retreating into them is simply submitting to an illusion of happiness. An illusion which hides the cracks of discord within its very structure and signals mental decline in the action it manifests. There are no indoor sandboxes and castles in the sun in the world of the healthy and the functional, for better or for ill. In order to live and to heal you have to find yourself comfortable in the knowledge that 'Fun, Fun, Fun' is a Pop song. It is not the miracle cure to a world where love seems lost and its possibilities have become so diffused that grasping them feels like the sand passing through your hands before you can construct any solid meaning from the constituent parts. Change comes from action, not the daydreams of a better day.
An 8 bar instrumental drifts the listener into the next section. Returning again to Steven Page with his solo guitar, accompanied by thundering reverb as well as layers of delayed panic-stricken backing vocals:
I had a dream
That I was three hundred pounds
And though I was very heavy
I floated 'til I couldn't see the ground (woah)
I floated 'til I couldn't see the ground
(Somebody), I couldn't see the ground (woah)
(Somebody), I couldn't see the ground
Somebody help me
This interlude is heartbreaking. There's no other way I can describe it to you. If you're the kind of person who gets upset by discussion of; body dysmorphia, disordered eating, dissociation, or Schizophrenia, you are welcome to skip ahead or close the article here. Heavy topics such as these can be very difficult and no discussion of a late 90s Pop song is more important than your health and well being. That being said, this section is the song's bleakest depiction of the mental state of its speaker. Whilst the song has already made reference to a number of disordered behaviours and anxieties, they're often the kind of ticks and thought patterns that people on the outside tend to be able to pass off as quirky or unconcerning. Of course the song itself disputes the argument that any of these anxieties and ticks are unworthy of concern: Compulsive collecting, mechanical repetition, constructing escapist fantasies; are all understood to be part of the song's portrait of loneliness and illness. There were two periods in the aftermath of the failure to produce Smile in which Brian Wilson's weight ballooned to over 300lbs. One of these coincided with the period in which he spent three years in bed. The relationship between mental wellness and body mass is a very strange and very delicate balance. There are instances in which anxiety disorders lead to drastic BMI increase and their are instances in which it can lead to drastic and much more immediately dangerous BMI decrease. The reasons for this aren't simple. Roger McIntyre, MD, at the University of Toronto, posits that overeating occurs because of the way depression disrupts the brain's reward system. In simple terms, the patient begins to eat increased amounts because they no longer receive the adequate amount of pleasure that they would have previously gotten from a meal. This is, fundamentally, the groundwork for most escalating addictions. What the narrator of the song is describing isn't actual weight gain, but a fantasy of weight gain. This fantasy complicates the matter. When carrying out the research for this section all I could find were a couple of blogs about weight gain fantasy from the perspective of sexual fetish. I don't believe that's what's happening here. I think this is an extension of the fantasy of the prior interlude. I read the BMI increase fantasy as the subject becoming aware of the tendencies that are emerging from their own disordered action and their recognition has led to the distortion of their nostalgic paradise into a nightmare. They imagine a horrifying scenario in which they swell to balloon-like size and float beyond any attachment to the real world. The speaker then drifts away far beyond any concrete elements of the real or imagined worlds.
The other issue at play in this bridging section is the medical diagnosis of Brian Wilson as it's understood by the general public. Wilson has been diagnosed officially with schizoaffective disorder, manic depression, and he has reported his issues with suffering§ from auditory hallucinations since the early 1960s. All of these issues have been public for decades and have become part of the Beach Boys mythology. Until relatively recently it was commonly believed that these issues mixed with years of substance abuse led to a complete 'burnout' which stagnated Wilson's career. Although, it is increasingly apparent that his psychologist, Eugene Landy, was exacerbating these issues with a decade long programme of psychotropic drugs administered in order to keep Wilson completely sedate and compliant. Within the public consciousness, Brian Wilson is a schizophrenic. What often goes misunderstood about schizophrenia, beyond its wide variety of symptoms, is its significant comorbidity axis with other mental illnesses. A 2009 entry to the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry headed by Katherine A McMillan, delves deeper into the topic, but there is increasing evidence to suggest that schizophrenia patients are at an increased risk of developing anxiety disorders, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and dependency issues. The interplay in this section between multiple voices, cavernous auditory manipulation, and the frantic delivery work to communicate a mental sensory diagnosis. I don't want to sit and diagnose the speaker with any illness, especially one which effects a huge number of people in a very real and serious way, but there is a sense where they have lost touch with reality in such a way that it is reminiscent of a co-morbid cocktail of illnesses all worsening each other. This combination of effects place such tremendous strain on the nervous system that the subject completely dissociates as a means of coping; the voice pleading with the listener to help drag them back towards reality.
Finally, the song returns to its opening verse, this time in explosive fashion. It functions almost as a de facto chorus; designed to be screamed at the top of your lungs while you jump around the confines of whatever space you find yourself trapped in. We're all, once again, driving down town in the rain to that late night record shop. Why? Because it's the only thing that really soothes. The speaker is giving into the impulsion, compulsion, and insanity of knowing that engaging in the same cyclical behaviour won't solve any of their problems. It's incredibly easy from the outside to write commentary on the dangers of this behaviour and how returning to the start is never the answer when one needs to break their personal ailments. But I don't suppose that gives enough credit to the fact that survival in the face of overwhelming anxiety and loneliness is so insurmountable a challenge that sometimes all one can do is to give in and admit that when you're surrounded you just can't stop.
Love and mercy to you, my friends.
R. T. Sweeney
'Brian Wilson' - The Barenaked Ladies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch84fmOa414
'God Only Knows' Brian Wilson, Live 2002: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ2RJwTwbzg