For Brian Wilson’s lengthy contributions to the tarnished monolith of 20th-century rock culture, neither he nor his work has ever sat easily within it.

“When I was around 10 or 12 years old,” Brian Wilson said, “my mom and I were walking to the market one day and a dog started barking at us. When I asked my mom, ‘Why is that dog barking at us?’ she said, ‘Son, some dogs pick up vibrations from some people, and when they pick up bad vibrations, they bark.’ And I said, ‘What about good vibrations?’”

The Beach Boys' co-founder Brian Wilson has died at the age of 82, leaving behind a storied legacy as one of pop music's greatest songwriters and producers. Here are NPR's best interviews, concerts and appreciations of the late artist.

Donor-Advised Funds Support KQED by using your donor-advised fund to make a charitable gift. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ visionary and fragile leader whose genius for melody, arrangements and wide-eyed self-expression inspired “Good Vibrations ...

That version of Wilson was played by Paul Dano with eerie specificity. He captured Wilson’s unlikely combination of ambition, innocence, brilliance, and fragility. The sense that the man who produced so many incredible, haunting melodies was losing a piece of himself with every hit song. Parts of his soul that he would never get back.