Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

Losing Brian Wilson in 2025 hurt more than losing any other 82-year-old who you didn’t know personally ever should.

Now, to be clear, losing anyone who gave that much to pop music would always hurt. The man wrote ‘God Only Knows’, and that alone would make him someone worth treasuring for as long as we could.

However, there was also something particularly vulnerable about Brian Wilson. This was someone who hadn’t lucked into a world of untrammelled luxury and satisfaction through sheer God given talent, the way that most rock stars do. Hell, his bandmate and notable prick, Mike Love, did exactly that without even having any God given talent.

Despite being one of the most successful and beloved rock stars on the planet for longer than he wasn’t, Brian Wilson really didn’t feel like someone who led a charmed life. Now granted, it’s worth bearing in mind that the reason he lived through his history of profound mental health issues was because of his success in The Beach Boys, so he did have it slightly better than most, but that slightly is doing some seriously heavy lifting.

There were points where Wilson, either due to being overly medicated or, indeed, under medicated, seemed like nothing more than a lost cause. Pretty much unable to take care of himself, and his family and friends are unable to fathom how to put him back together again. He was in dire need of assistance, but he was also rich, famous and still in possession of those incredible musical talents. This made him a target for vultures and parasites seeking to make a buck off him.

The biggest of all of them came to him, claiming to be his saviour, a therapist named Eugune Landy.

Why is this Brian Wilson album so depressing?

There are a few rallying cries among Beach Boys fans. The first is that Mike Love is an asshole, but you wouldn’t have ‘Good Vibrations’ without him. The second is that Murry Wilson was a monster, but you wouldn’t have the Wilsons without him. The third, final and most important one is fuck Eugene Landy forever. The man was a starfucking fraud who abused Brian Wilson for years in the name of medicine, yet it’s plain to see that all he really wanted to do was get famous off the back of Wilson.

For proof of this, look no further than the unreleased, but written and recorded Brian Wilson solo album, Sweet Insanity. The record was produced as a follow-up to Wilson’s 1988 self-titled solo debut and was the moment Landy went full mask-off regarding what he really wanted out of Wilson. You see, this was the record that this so-called therapist installed himself as Wilson’s business and creative partner, producing the record and writing most of the lyrics.

The record could be the second coming of Pet Sounds, and this would still be a completely unacceptable breach of trust and abuse of a patient. Yet to add insult to injury, this is not the second coming of Pet Sounds. It makes Summer in Paradise sound like the second coming of Pet Sounds. It’s the sound of a wannabe music mogul bullying a vulnerable person into producing content to make them rich. Why else would there be Brian Wilson’s one and only attempt at a hip-hop track on there?

The only silver lining of all this is that Beach Boys fans weren’t fooled by this. When the album was announced with Landy’s involvement, the uproar was so bad that the sole writer of a positive review of the album was sent death threats by Beach Boys fans. Music writers really can’t win, eh? It was all for nought anyway. Wilson’s record label took one listen to the album, and when they figured out it wasn’t a joke, they immediately cancelled the album and released Wilson from his contract.

In 1992, two years after Sweet Release was mercifully cancelled, Landy’s conservatorship of Wilson was ended, and a restraining order was placed on him. Good riddance.