Top 10 Mike Love Beach Boys Songs

In one respect, Mike Love spent his career in the shadows of his cousin Brian Wilson, the writer, producer and singer often referred to as the Beach Boys‘ mastermind. It took a court battle to claw back some of the credit that Love said he always deserved as a co-composer.

But Love was always the center of attention on stage, as the group’s principal vocalist and most animated performer. The focus on Love only became more intense after Brian Wilson stepped away, then his brothers Dennis and Carl Wilson died. By the turn of a new century, Love had become the Beach Boys personified.

Yet he remained a complex figure. Mainly, because he loved their early-era songs about hot rods, pretty girls and endless summers. As the Beach Boys began to create more explorative music, beginning with 1966’s Pet Sounds, Love wasn’t immediately on board. He eventually came around but still kept the shows, thousands of them, determinedly focused on their original sun-kissed sound.

What’s the Best Mike Love Beach Boys Song?

As shown in the following list of Top 10 Mike Love Beach Boys Songs, however, he made important contributions in the studio long after the days of breezy pop fare like “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Some of this material was downright revolutionary – though not every memorable Love vocal qualified: We’re focusing on songs where Love is the principal singer.

So, left aside is 1966’s “Good Vibrations,” a collaborative vocal that later became part of the stitched-together Smiley Smile LP – even though it’s an undeniably great Mike Love vocal performance. Same with “I Get Around” and the ageless title track from 1964’s All Summer Long.

There are also plenty of deep-cut gems best described as co-lead singing performances, like “Kiss Me, Baby” with Brian Wilson from 1965’s The Beach Boys Today! or “Let the Wind Blow” with Carl Wilson from 1967’s Wild Honey. More recently, “Isn’t It Time” from the Beach Boys’ 2012 reunion album That’s Why God Made the Radio featured one of his last vocal collaborations with the late Brian Wilson.

READ MORE: The Beach Boys Released One of the 20 Best B-Sides That Became Hits

Others didn’t make the cut simply because there were only 10 available slots on this list. A more in-depth countdown might even include 1988’s “Kokomo,” though that chart-topping late-career single always felt more like a Beach Boys pastiche than the real thing.

Keep scrolling as UCR takes a ranked look back at the very best Mike Love Beach Boys songs:

 
No. 10. “Big Sur”
From: Holland (1973)

One of the Beach Boys’ most enchanting qualities has always been their sense of golden-hour reverie. “Big Sur,” part of a three-part song cycle dubbed “California Saga” on Side 1 of the deeply underrated Holland, showed how they could adapt that contemplative vibe to more sophisticated subject matter and song structure.

Mike Love’s first pass on this finely detailed tribute to home was just disarmingly gorgeous, but “Big Sur” didn’t appear on 1971’s Surf’s Up for some inexplicable reason. The Beach Boys returned to it while recording the follow-up LP in the Dutch town of Baambrugge, and “Big Sur” became the first song where Love completed both the lyrics and music.

 
No. 9. “Little Saint Nick”
From: Single (1963)
Hopelessly derivative, but fun nonetheless – and Mike Love’s vocal has everything to do with that. Who else but the early Beach Boys would have thought to re-envision St. Nick’s sleigh as a souped-up North Pole dragster with a four-speed stick? It’s “candy apple red with a ski for a wheel – and when Santa hits the gas, man, just watch her peel!”

So OK, it’s nothing more than a retread of the gold-selling Top 10 hit “Little Deuce Coupe,” which the Beach Boys had just released six months earlier. But dig those added sleigh bells.

 
No. 8. “Surfin’ USA”
From: Surfin’ U.S.A. (1963)

Speaking of derivative things. There has been no bigger fan of surf songs than Mike Love. With “Surfin’ USA,” he sang one of the very best. Certainly, there’d been no better sales pitch for sunny California. The single promptly became a double-platinum-certified No. 3 smash. There was just one problem.

The Beach Boys initially issued “Surfin’ USA” with Brian Wilson as the sole songwriter even though its music and even the lyrical structure mimicked Chuck Berry‘s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Subsequent releases, starting with 1966’s Best of The Beach Boys, finally credited Berry. Still later, “Surfin’ USA” was included in Love’s lawsuit to earn more Beach Boys songwriting credits, but it was not part of the final judgment in his favor.

 
No. 7. “Here Today”
From: Pet Sounds (1966)

The last song recorded for Pet Sounds, “Here Today” belies its silly original name: “I Don’t Have a Title Yet.” First, there’s a narrative twist that a different singer might have had trouble navigating.

Brian Wilson and co-writer Tony Asher created a protagonist for Love who begins by carefully warning someone about the emotional risks with a new love interest, only to ultimately reveal himself as the one whose heart she’d broken. The music is just as sophisticated, with a bass-led structure and this elongated middle section that only adds to the innate drama. Wilson needed some dozen studio musicians to get there.

 
No. 6. “409”
From: Surfin’ Safari (1962)

The Beach Boys were also prone to songs about cars early on. “409” transcended the others, and not just because of its anthem-like propulsion. Co-writer Gary Usher had an intimate knowledge of how these hot rods actually worked, and that imparted this track – which was inspired by Chevrolet’s powerhouse four-speed V-8 of the early-’60s – with an uncommon street cred.

Usher suggested writing this song while he and Wilson were on their way to buy a part for his car. “We’ll do a thing ‘giddy up, giddy up,’ meaning horses for horsepower,” Usher later remembered saying – “just kidding around.” The other details, however, were note perfect.

These engines were 409-cubic-foot behemoths with four-barrel carburetors – known as “dual quads.” Maybe Mike Love knew what all of this really meant; maybe he didn’t. But all of it found a way into “409,” and Love kept the pedal firmly pressed to the floorboard.

 
No. 5. “California Girls”
From: Summer Days [And Summer Nights!!] (1965)

There has also been no bigger fan of girl songs than Mike Love. Except with “California Girls,” he helped complete the greatest of them all. Both Brian Wilson and Love were reportedly inspired by a trip, but as with so much involving this platinum-selling Top 5 single, there are two very different backstories.

Wilson was said to have begun work on the imaginatively constructed “California Girls” after an initial experience with acid, while Love started thinking about home – or more pointedly, girls back home – while on tour in Europe. They couldn’t agree on who wrote what.

Love would ultimately fight over this song’s individual lyrical contributions for decades before he finally won co-composer credits and royalties for some 35 Beach Boys songs – including “California Girls.” Ironically, this song had the working title of “We Don’t Know.”

 
No. 4. “That’s Not Me”
From: Pet Sounds (1966)

Working again with Tony Asher, Brian Wilson constructed a musical roadmap here characterized by deeply intriguing, almost avant-garde twists and turns. Yet the instrumentation on this deeply underrated Pet Sounds song is spacious, almost confidential. Even Dennis Wilson offers a quieter jazz-inflected drum pattern.

Mike Love would have to carry “That’s Not Me.” It wouldn’t be easy: The song travels another of Brian Wilson’s now-celebrated journeys toward youthful self-discovery, while at times seeming to deal directly with his then-recent departure from the Beach Boys’ endless touring schedule. But Love succeeds anyway, offering the most introspective singing of his entire career.

 
No. 3. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”
From: The Beach Boys Today! (1964)

This sounds like so many other fun, fun, fun little Mike Love songs, at least at first. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” hides its remarkable musical complexity inside an almost impossibly light-filled setting. Its big questions about growing up, too.

The result was another Top 10 hit, but probably one of the Beach Boys’ most misunderstood by anyone who isn’t a close listener. All of the contradictions reside inside Love. He pinpointed the inspiration for the lyric’s anxious views about pending adulthood, placing the blame on the Wilson brothers’ overbearing father. So why did Love approach “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” with the saccharine falsetto of a love song?

It’s actually the perfect choice when unraveling this song’s inherent emotional tensions. Love breezes through its most searching lines (“will I love my wife for the rest of my life?“) with a youngster’s ease, while the rest of the group interrogates him like a Greek chorus by relentlessly counting down the years of youth.

 
No. 2. “All I Wanna Do”
From: Sunflower (1970)

Ultimately, the Beach Boys had a really cool way of not always sounding like the Beach Boys. This even held true with Mike Love, despite his often-cited reticence about Brian Wilson’s later studio experimentalism. “All I Wanna Do” is the best example, as producer Carl Wilson added layer upon later to this almost ghostly Love co-write with Brian Wilson. It eventually starts sounding like a prehistoric dream-pop song.

They worked on it forever, trying out “All I Wanna Do” while recording both 1968’s Friends and 1969’s 20/20. Love utterly nailed the dreamscape vocal, while Carl Wilson contributed offbeat touches like electric sitar and Rocksichord. The delicately emotional arrangement, powered along by engineer Stephen Desper’s turn on Moog, is actually built on top of a cadence from a piccolo snare drum.

In a twist, it was Brian Wilson who thought they might have gone too far, saying the song “had a nice chord pattern” but “wasn’t done right.” Scores of unborn bedroom-recording kids would one day beg to differ.

 
No. 1. “Fun, Fun, Fun”
From: Shut Down Volume 2 (1964)

Seems Brian Wilson and Mike Love were doing promotional radio interviews in Utah when they heard the youthful secretary complain after her driving privileges were taken away when she lied to her father about using his car. They scribbled some notes for what became the Beach Boys’ second-ever Top 5 U.S. hit.

It’s early yet, so contemporary influences abound: “Fun, Fun, Fun” initially nods to the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” the drum fills were straight out of Phil Spector‘s Wall of Sound productions and the guitar echoed Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” But this song became Love’s and Love’s alone once he grabbed the mic.

He suggested the twist ending, where the girl ends up in someone else’s hot rod and then added striking vocals that crossed every part of his range, from high to very low. “Fun, Fun, Fun” became a watershed performance, a personal anthem and, for years, the Beach Boys’ closing song in concert.