The 20 Best Beach Boys Songs (Staff Picks)

At his peak, Brian Wilson — who died this week at age 82 — went through periods the way a painter does. First, he made his family-and-friends act The Beach Boys a band for all seasons (but one in particular) 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. 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.

Any one of these periods would’ve been enough to ensure Brian Wilson’s place in rock history, but the combination of them guarantees him and his Beach Boys catalog absolute immortality, the kind that in 200 years might have him known simply as “Wilson,” the way we refer to Monet or Van Gogh today. Generations raised on the Beach Boys have since raised additional generations of their own on the Beach Boys, to the point where their signature songs are now so entrenched in our DNA that merely looking at a list of their song titles is enough to make you burst into tears at their associated feelings and memories, and at the possibility (and ultimately, the cost) of peak human artistic achievement.

Here is our staff’s list of the 20 most essential Beach Boys songs — a peerless collection of works that still only covers a wall or two in the larger museum of Brian Wilson’s life and times.

To see the Beach Boys’ 40 biggest hits on the Billboard Hot 100 over the course of their career, head here.