Westerman on the Beach Boys Classic He Wishes He Wrote
When I ask Will Westerman how he feels about the tour for his debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, being stalled by the coronavirus pandemic, he audibly shrugs. “I mean, you’ve just got to keep perspective and not personalize the situation,” he says. At the moment, he’s just happy it’s a beautiful day in his current home of London.
This air of level-headed patience permeates his music, too. While his spare and meticulous songs are personal—often rooted in themes of love, loss, and even chronic pain—Westerman maintains the candor of a wise observer. His background as a choir singer is evident in the new album’s lush harmonies, so it comes as no surprise that the song he wishes he wrote is one of the most heavenly hits in the history of popular music. For Westerman, “God Only Knows,” from the Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds, is a work of great universality—its technical genius matched only by its precise yet effortless rendering of human compassion.
Pitchfork: Why did you choose this song?
Westerman: I love the fact that it’s so immediate—the melody. It’s just unbelievably beautiful. So I’m jealous of that. [laughs] It sounds like a marching band of wide-eyed, smiling faces, like something out of The Nutcracker. And it’s both happy and sad at the same time, which is something that I always love in pop music. It’s just how life is, isn’t it? There’s this incredibly light and joyful melody, and then the first line is, “I may not always love you.”
There’s also this unspoken yearning. It’s just such a compassionate sentiment, unfiltered in this childish way. It’s very unpretentious and un-self important. I’m very attracted to the lack of filter in the lyrics. It sounds like a person speaking to you without thinking about how you’re going to perceive what they’re saying. There’s a strange confidence to that. That’s something I try to do when I’m thinking about what I want to say.
Do you think you’re capable of writing a song like this?
I don’t know how to answer that without putting myself down or sounding unbelievably egotistical. [laughs] Songs like this don’t come around very often. That’s why they’re immortal. It just feels very compassionate, and that’s definitely something that I aspire to with my music. It’s a song I play a lot when I’m feeling annoyed with myself or beating myself up. It makes me feel better. I play it almost as if the song’s for me.
Why do you think this song is so timeless?
The central phrase is something that every human being—apart from psychopaths—can relate to. Beyond that, it’s quite easy to sing. The melody moves in a way that you don’t have to be musical to sing along. Most universal music is not incredibly complex melodically, because if it were, then some people wouldn’t be able to get involved. A 3-year-old could sing this song.
It’d be a pretty dark song for a 3-year-old to sing.
But the great thing is that they wouldn’t know what they were singing.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
