I’m alone but I won’t be afraid
By: James Caig
Tags: Brian Wilson, Music, Lyrics, Beach Boys

It’s soul music, really. Direct from its maker’s soul to yours. So delicate, strong, hopeful. Like so many Beach Boys songs the feeling gets you before you can explain it. It’s one of the most beautiful things I know.

It’s a song by an almost childlike man about a very grown-up idea: that admitting pain is the first step to healing it. That pain happens and it’s normal. The words themselves are guileless, there are few rhymes, no metaphor, no irony or subtext, no plea for special treatment. No victim hood either. He just….tells you. Straight. The way a young child would.

There’s a world where

I can go and

Tell my secrets to:

In my room

In my room

These are children’s words. See it in the simplicity, the words of (mostly) one syllable. See it too in the syntax — that final, superfluous ‘to’ that shouldn’t be there but sounds like it should. See it in the way each line breaks, mid-sentence, with no polish or beat, the melody counting out the syllables carefully like steps: one two three four, one two three four, one two three four five; how each line, two of four and one of five, shifts the melody upwards before it plateaus, as if were not really steps but stairs, carrying a child to bed, or at least to her bedroom, to sanctuary, retreating as she rises, thirteen steady equal steps, until she reaches the landing and the comforting resolution of the hook brings her — and us — to the place she’s longed for all along, and the harmonies swirl happiness and melancholy together to become the sound of childhood, innocent but wary, safe but also in need of safety: in my room.

In this world I

Lock out all my

Worries and my fears:

In my room

In my room

Brian Wilson co-wrote this song with a man called Gary Usher. They wrote lots of hits together, but this — this. It’s not about surfing, or teenage love, or cars, it’s spare, beautiful, you’d say unadorned were it not for the rich intricacies of those harmonies, the deep wells of emotion it digs. Brian was 21 when he wrote it. 21 and already harking back to adolescence, which would be remarkable in itself, a young man alive and successful and caught in the exciting rush of 60s pop culture, but is even more remarkable given the undeniable pain that adolescence brought him. Yet he somehow sought to endlessly recapture that feeling, and that effort defined a sound, an aesthetic, a generation — an idea. Endless Summer, the Beach Boys called their greatest hits — only the summers you get when you’re young are that — but you wonder how much fun Brian really had. He was the loner describing the cool guys’ world, on the outside looking in. That nostalgia everyone else felt, you imagine he felt it even as it was happening; a live grief for what he could never have. Music was where Brian would go to deal with whatever sorrows life brought his way. In My Room was the place he didn’t have to miss out.

Do my dreaming and my scheming

Lie awake and pray

Do my crying and my sighing

Laugh at yesterday

In My Room was written, like so many of the Beach Boys early hits, at Brian’s house, where he lived with his parents and his two brothers, who were also Beach Boys. Back then, at the beginning, they all still lived in that house, the house where they learned to sing, and learned to sing together, and to sing together like no one ever sang together before or since.

Gary Usher remembers the moment this way:

When we finished [the song], it was late, after our midnight curfew. In fact, Murry [the Wilsons’ father] came in a couple of times and wanted me to leave. Anyway, we got Audree [their mother], who was putting her hair up before bed, and we played it for her. She said, “That’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written.” Murry said, “Not bad, Usher, not bad,” which was the nicest thing he ever said to me

You get the feeling from this, from everything about him, that if music was Brian’s sanctuary from his isolation outside, In My Room is the sanctuary he needed at home. Murry was a brute, a bully. He hit his boys. Brian was hard of hearing in one ear — a result, it’s sometimes suggested, of a particularly tough beating. Imagine you’re Brian, writing In My Room — it only took an hour apparently — and your Mum stops, yes dear, to listen, and tells you it’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written. She knows. Then imagine your Dad, cantankerous, jealous, Murry, the man who tried to send your professional writing partner home, the man who tells his 21 year old pop star genius son what he can and can’t do, where he will and won’t go, saying what he said. We all know the man that Murry Wilson was.

Now it’s dark and

I’m alone but

I won’t be afraid

In my room, in my room

In my room, in my room

In my room, in my room

Some say In My Room is about Brian’s need for refuge. A literal description of his feelings as he escaped from Murry.

Brian Wilson says, because he would, that the idea came from Gary Usher, who noticed that Brian often slept in the music room, at night, next to the piano. That was where he found his sanctuary. So, as Brian played those thirteen notes, four then four then five, and as he walked up those thirteen steps towards some kind of harmonic resolution, Gary sang some words which described what Brian did and how he felt in the room in which they were writing.

Brian Wilson says when he and his brothers recorded In My Room, it reminded him of singing together in their bedroom at night, back when they were young, learning the pop songs of the day, soft and soothing, quiet and pure.

All of these are true, because for Brian Wilson, music was always circular. The song is about how it came about. The sound is of the feeling it describes. Making it reminds him of the times he was imagining the possibility of making it. The music circles back to itself, and at the centre of this circle, always, is In My Room. Music is his room. It’s where he goes to tell his secrets, lock out all his worries, his fears, to learn not to be afraid. In My Room is where he goes to commemorate and then remember what it feels like to be in his room. The words are the feeling is the music is the need. The pain is the hope is the healing. It circles round from the soul of its maker to yours. It is soul music.

Some say In My Room is universal.