Composition
The music for the song came from Brian Wilson's first LSD experience. In the Beautiful Dreamer documentary, Wilson said that shortly after taking LSD, he ran up to a bedroom and hid under a pillow, shouting "I'm afraid of my mom, I'm afraid of my dad." Sometime later, he left the room and went to a piano. He started playing in the bass the B-F#-G# pattern over and over, and then added in the right hand after a few minutes a B chord, moving to an A chord. Within a half hour, he had come up with the "well east-coast girls are hip, I really dig the styles they wear" part of the song. The next day, he and Mike Love supposedly finished off the remainder of the song.
"California Girls" was the first Beach Boys recording to feature vocals from Bruce Johnston, who had joined the group to substitute for Brian Wilson on concert tours.
Read more about this topic: California Girls
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither increases nor diminishes. But as it is certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea which we conceive; it follows, that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)