The Zig Zag Process of Musical Creativity: The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”

When most people think of creativity, they think of the solitary lone genius, creating in silence far from the distractions of other people. Musical composition seems to be a great example of solitary creativity: The image of the singer-songwriter, writing songs about her own personal life and relationships. But this kind of musical creativity is rare. Most songs are composed in a highly collaborative process. One example is the Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations,” which was a flower-power love song.

The band spent 7 months in the studio producing the song. A new interview with four members of the group reveals the wandering, zigzagging, collaborative creative process. Here are a few of the steps in the process:

  1. At the age of 14, a dog barked at Brian Wilson’s mom. She said “Sometimes dogs pick up vibrations from people.”
  2. Nine years later, Wilson remembered this statement, and wrote a short chord progression for a song based on what his mom said. No lyrics were written yet.
  3. Combining cello and electro-theremin on the chorus was his brother Carl’s idea.
  4. They had the instrumentals recorded, and they liked what they heard on the tape, but there still weren’t lyrics for the song. At the time, Wilson was writing lyrics together with Tony Asher. When they first sat down, Wilson was calling the song “Good Vibes.” Asher thought “vibes” sounded cheap and trivial, and suggested “vibrations.”
  5. Asher wrote the first verse and chorus, including “good, good, good, good vibrations.”
  6. At the time, it didn’t really come together, and they put the song aside for a while.
  7. Later, Wilson asked musician Mike Love to come up with some lyrics for the same song. He ended up liking Mike’s lyrics better. (Mike was the one who coined the word “excitations.”)
  8. Since they wrote the first draft of the lyrics, the drug culture of hippies and flower power had emerged in the public eye. Mike was finally ready to write the verses. In the spirit of the newly trending flower power, he wrote lyrics including “I love the colorful clothes she wears and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair.”
  9. A few lines later is the line “on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air.” His original draft said “incense” instead of “perfume” but he decided that incense would be “a little much for Middle America.”
  10. Wilson arranged the vocals for these lyrics. In the studio, Wilson dropped the words “we find” from the end of the second verse, so the bass and drums would come through better.
  11. When the band listened to the initial vocal tracks, they realized the song needed some sort of contrast. Mike Love and Brian Wilson came up with a ballad duet inspired by Stephen Foster’s songs, and they added it as a bridge.

Brian Wilson was a very creative individual, but even Wilson worked in a collaborative web, and the songs we know and love came out of a collaborative, emergent, unpredictable, wandering process.