California Girls

“California Girls” is a song by the American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1965 album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). Written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, the lyrics detail an appreciation for women across the world and a wish that they all lived in the band’s home state, California. It was released as a single, backed with “Let Him Run Wild”, and reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also a top 10 hit in several other countries, becoming one of the band’s most successful songs globally. Wilson conceived “California Girls” during his first acid trip while thinking about women and Western film scores. The song is distinguished for its orchestral prelude, layered vocals, and chromaticism. Wilson later referred to it as “a hymn to youth”, the Beach Boys’ “anthem”, and his favorite record by the group, although he remained dissatisfied with their vocal performance. It was the band’s first recording with touring musician Bruce Johnston, who was not yet an official member of the group. “California Girls” inspired the Beatles’ parody “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and many songs with similar or identical titles, including Big Star’s “September Gurls”, the Magnetic Fields’ “California Girls”, and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”. In 1984, David Lee Roth recorded a cover version that also peaked at number 3. In 2010, the Beach Boys’ recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2011, Rolling Stone ranked it number 72 on its list of the greatest songs of all time. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it as one of “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”. A lot of [our] songs are the results of emotional experiences, sadness and pain. Or joy, exultation, and so on. Like “California Girls”—a hymn to youth. Brian Wilson, according to some accounts, was inspired to write “California Girls” during his first time taking the psychedelic drug LSD,[6] an occasion supervised by his friend Loren Schwartz. Wilson corroborated in the 2004 documentary Beautiful Dreamer that he had written the song while on his first acid trip, but in the 2021 documentary Long Promised Road, he stated that he wrote the song during the week after the trip when he was sober. In a 2007 interview, Wilson explained that he had gone to his piano and “was thinking about the music from cowboy movies. And I sat down and started playing it, bum-buhdeeda, bum-buhdeeda. I did that for about an hour. I got these chords going. Then I got this melody, it came pretty fast after that.”[6] He said that “California Girls” was intended to encapsulate the feel of the Drifters’ version of “On Broadway”. and on other occasions, said that the shuffle beat in the song was influenced by Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”. The next day, as Wilson recalled, he and his bandmate Mike Love finished the remainder of the song.[6] Love was not originally listed as the song’s co-writer, but was awarded a credit after his successful 1990s lawsuit for songwriting credits. He said that he approached Wilson about the omission when the song was released, and that Wilson had told him that the mistake was the fault of Wilson’s father Murry, the band’s publisher. In a 1988 interview, Brian blamed himself. “I knew that my dad made a mistake by putting my name on there only.” Session musician Carol Kaye, who played on the recording, credited all the music to Wilson, with the only exception being a bass fill she invented at the end of the bridge section. Wilson and Love later disagreed over the extent of their lyrical contributions. Love said that he wrote “every syllable” of the song apart from “I wish they all could be California girls”. In his recollection, he wrote the lyrics “in less than an hour” while he was in the hallway of the recording studio during the session for the backing track. Wilson disputed Love’s assertion. “I wrote a lot of those lyrics too; it was line for line, back and forth between us. That’s what happened.” He said that he came up with the opening lines and subject matter, and that “Every other line was his or mine. … Everybody loves girls, right? Everybody loves California and the sun. That’s what I wanted from the song. And to mention all the parts of the country, that’s fun, people will like that.”