Writers are often asked who our influences are. Because I am a journalist, questioners are often surprised that mine are songwriters. I am a columnist who unconsciously writes with a cadence that is blatantly musical. There is a rhythm to my phrasing, to my words and the way I construct them. I find myself reading out loud, counting the beats on my fingers and measuring whether another word would flow better.

That is why my idols are, among others, Stevie Wonder, Neil Finn, Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette and Brian Wilson, who wrote “God Only Knows,” which I staunchly believe to be the most brilliantly honest love song in existence. With the news of his passing on Wednesday at 82, I feel a little less tethered, a little less inspired and a lot more lonely as a creator because this genius is no longer in the world.

One of the things I loved most about the former Beach Boy is that he was weird. I mean this as a compliment; I, too, am weird. It’s good. Weirdness is part of being an artist. It’s the reason some societies institutionalized their creatives — they seemed to be guided by something wild and unconventional and were therefore considered unruly and sick.

Wilson found fame creating catchy pop songs about surfing and driving fast in cars with girls and then veered off course into the experimental “Pet Sounds,” one of history’s finest albums. Normal people can’t do that.

My off-centered thinking and drive to go in an unexpected way are what pay my bills. So I recognize a kindred spirit in the man whose eccentricities inspired a Barenaked Ladies song about his onetime inability to leave his bed.

There are so many pieces of Wilson’s genius, of his off-kilter goodness, that I could point to as I pen a tribute to this man: the otherwordly harmony arrangement in “Good Vibrations,” the layered entreaties of “Don’t Worry Baby.” But the cherry on top of his astonishing sonic sundae is “God Only Knows,” lauded by lyrical gods such as Paul McCartney and Jimmy Webb as a singularly momentous work.

It comes on like a typical ode to the fleeting nature of young love. “I may not always love you,” it begins, confirming the experience of those of us old enough to remember the people we swore were youthful soulmates but were emphatically not. Girl, I don’t even remember half their names!

And then Wilson drops the boom.

“But as long as there are stars above you / You never need to doubt it / I’ll make you so sure about it / God only knows what I’d be without you.”

Oh my God, that ache! That youthful sense of sureness that this person is your muse, your lifeline, the only thing that stands between you and eternity. And you believe it so much that doubt and pain and time cannot breach it. It takes pain to love that way, to stand yourself up on a precipice and declare. Again, it’s usually foolhardy and wrong, because I have thought myself to be in love many, many times with people that weren’t worth a grocery list, let along a song.

But Wilson performed the magic trick of making an utterance of desperate love into a transcendent work of art, and that’s because he knew what his inspiration was and went with it. He would simply not be told no. In 2004, writer Tom Smucker wrote an essay for the Library of Congress about how “Pet Sounds” was “a financial disappointment, a potentially career collapsing abandonment of the Beach Boys surf, car, and summer songs.” But Wilson did not care about convention or the money he was risking with his conviction and need to listen to his better artistic angels.

I dig that so very much, just like I did Stevie Wonder going from harmonica-playing child prodigy to social commentator in double-album form, or McCartney growing from his mop-top roots to the creator of rock symphonies like “Live and Let Die.” There is something so delicious about zigging when they expect you to zag, about having something for ’em they don’t see coming.

Wilson battled demons, with mental health, family and relationships. He made choices that people did not understand. But he emerged with his fragile genius intact, and his masterwork has been covered more than 100 times. Even as a 54-year-old who has loved and lost, I recognize in him, and in “God Only Knows,” the seed of bravery, of wishing on a song or a love or a creative way of thinking and holding on to it no matter what anyone says.

Will it be folly? Maybe. But might it, instead, turn out to be genius?

God only knows.