The Beach Boys intro Brian Wilson called "the greatest piece of music I've ever written"

30 July 2026, 11:14

Brian Wilson wrote a lot of stunning music, but this moment was his very favourite.

It feels next to impossible to pick out a single Beach Boys song as being Brian Wilson's best.

'I Get Around', 'God Only Knows', 'Good Vibrations', 'Wouldn't It be Nice', 'Surf's Up'... the list of all-time great songs is pretty much endless.

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But when it came to Brian Wilson's own judgement of his work, he picked one specific moment as his very greatest.

And being as precise as he was, he didn't choose a whole song - but just one intro in particular: 'California Girls', the single from July 1965, which also featured on that month's Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album.

The year after the song was released, Brian called the song "a hymn to youth", and he would later talk about how it came together.

“Everybody was up. The whole gang was there. It became my favourite session," Brian said in a Capitol Records interview in 1993, reproduced by American Songwriter.

California Girls (Stereo)

"The intro to this song is the greatest piece of music I’ve ever written. I was looking for an introduction which would be totally different to the rest of the song but would lead into it.

"The song was a big record for us, but I never really liked anything other than the intro."

He later told Record Collector: "I came up with the introduction first. I'm still really proud of that introduction. It has a classical feel.

"I wrote the song in the same key as the introduction. It took me some time. I wanted to write a song that had the traditional country and western left-hand piano riff, like an old country song from the early '50s."

The Beach Boys - California Girls (Studio Instrumental Sessions)

As the story goes, Wilson came up with the song during his first ever acid trip, while thinking about the all-important topics of women and Westerns.

'California Girls' was originally credited to Brian Wilson alone, but Mike Love was awarded co-writing credit after his 1990s Beach Boys lawsuit.

"I knew that my dad made a mistake by putting my name on there only," Brian said in 1988, before the matter was settled.

Lyrics aside, apart from a bass fill by Carol Kaye, Brian is thought to have written all the music for the song – including that intro.

The Beach Boys - California Girls (1968)

And when it came to the words themselves, Brian definitely wrote the "I wish they all could be California girls" line.

Mike Love claims to have written all the rest, but Brian always maintained that they alternated the lyrics on the track.

"The idea for 'California Girls' is that there's this guy who thinks about girls all the time, so much that he starts to imagine all kinds," Brian wrote in his second memoir.

"But there's only one kind he really wants, and that's right there at home."