Today’s song was inspired by my son, who this week was telling me how cool, underappreciated, and revolutionary he thought this song was…even though it came out 33 years before he was born.

I agreed with him. And then I remembered that the composer and producer of the song died last month. So it seemed appropriate to recognize the gifts he gave us before he left this physical plane, including this song. The Forever No. 1 title comes from https://www.billboard.com, a leading popular music website. Their tradition for honoring musical greats who have died is doing a deep dive into one of their songs that became #1 on the music charts.

But the choice was confirmed with yesterday’s meditation at my spiritual center. The meditation leader was talking about how most of us with caring hearts are struggling lately. When there are sad or unfair or violent or ugly things going on, we can’t pretend they aren’t happening. We also have to process the usually “low vibration” energies those tend to generate in our hearts. We may feel grief, frustration, anger, judgment, or resignation. But, she said, after we feel those things, we need to return to higher vibration feelings. Being stuck in the low vibration emotions just adds to grief, frustration, anger, judgment, and resignation. The only way to combat those kinds of feelings is to send higher vibration energies into the world. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
Strength to Love, 1963

That’s the intention of Motivational Music Monday. I try to post uplifting songs that can help us find the light, the love, the positivity within ourselves even when events around us seem to be the exact opposite.

So have you figured out what song I’ve chosen for this week’s Motivational Music Monday? I’ve tried to lay out several clues…

It is what many consider to be Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s best song: “Good Vibrations.”

Superficially, it might seem like a typical Beach Boys song. It is full of the heavenly harmonics of sunny (literally and figuratively) California boys singing about their attraction to a California girl. But it is so much more than that.

Brian Wilson, who was the chief songwriter and producer for the Beach Boys, labored over this song for over 6 months. In his mind, he knew exactly the sounds he wanted for each instrument and each voice for each bar of the song. So they recorded snippets of the song, over and over again, in multiple sessions at 4 or 5 different studios. The other Beach Boys had no idea how Wilson would stitch together the different few seconds of music they recorded each time. Plus, Wilson added two nontraditional instruments to their regular ensemble. One was a cello…said to be the first use of a cello in a rock song. The other was an electro theremin, the electronic version of the world’s weirdest instrument:

Here is another Beach Boy explaining its use in the song:

Mike Love is supposed to be the one who came up with the line “She’s giving me excitations.” He has said it wasn’t really a word, but it rhymed. Except, it is really a word…in quantum physics. In physics, it means a jump in energy from some standard state to a higher state. So while the lyrics may be focused on a romantic attraction, the song itself is really about the energy you feel when you are in that state. That excitation isn’t limited to a love interest. Ideally, that’s what we’re feeling about life itself.

And that’s exactly what Motivational Music Monday is all about. I try to find songs that if you are depressed, they can lift you up to normal. If you are at a normal level of energy, they can bring you up to a higher vibration. And if you’re already at a high level…the sky’s the limit!

So I’m thinking “Good Vibrations” might be the theme song for this entire series of posts!

If you want to read more about the details of this song, here is the Billboard.com article: https://www.billboard.com/music/features/the-beach-boys-good-vibrations-forever-number-one-1236002221/

You can watch the Beach Boys recording the song itself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5qPogfhLIc

This week, let’s honor the man Sir Paul McCartney called a “musical genius” by sending out our good vibrations, OK?