Happy Anniversary: Brian Wilson, “Love and Mercy”

27 years ago today, Brian Wilson released the first single from his first-ever solo album, and although it utterly failed to make the Billboard Hot 100, it has since gone on to become as much of a signature song for Wilson as anything he ever recorded with the Beach Boys.

The opening track of Wilson's 1988 self-titled effort, “Love and Mercy” emerged after its composer had played “What the World Needs Now” on the piano and found himself going into his own song, or at least that's how he explained it in the liner notes of the 2000 reissue of the album. If that's the case, then it appears that the new movie about Wilson's life - entitled, not coincidentally, Love and Mercy - may have taken some liberties with the song's origins, since there's a scene in the film which seems to indicate that he wrote the music spontaneously while playing piano for his future wife, Melinda. Hey, either way, the end result was a classic track with a beautiful message.

Sadly, the Brian Wilson album failed to catch on with consumers, which is about how things went down when its singles were dispatched to radio. Wilson himself never gave up on the song, however, nor did some of his more famous fans: Bono has mentioned his love of the track, it was covered by Wilco, and earlier this year Gazelle Twin recorded a version of the song for AMC's The Walking Dead. To this day, you'll be hard pressed to attend a Wilson concert without finding him performing the song in the waning moments of the show, giving the fans what they need each night.