‘In My Room’ on the Riverfront

I was walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan when I decided to turn onto Pier 45, a promenade that allows pedestrians to get close to the water. Scores of people were on the pier, savoring a summer Sunday afternoon.

At the far end I heard someone singing lyrics that I have known for 60 years: “There’s a world where I can go, and tell my secrets to . . . ”

It was “In My Room,” the 1963 Beach Boys song in which Brian Wilson’s pure, youthful voice told a haunting story of finding solace behind a closed door.

“In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears . . .”

It wasn’t Mr. Wilson’s voice I was hearing on Pier 45, though. Someone else was singing a live version of the song.

An African-American man, around 70, sat alone at an electric keyboard. He didn’t face in, toward the people walking on the pier, as he sang, but out, toward the river itself.

Mr. Wilson, 81, has been ailing lately. He isn’t touring or performing in public. Those who love his music miss him.

And here was this man on the pier, singing to the water. Singing the words on which Brian’s voice had conferred a kind of immortality. I continued my walk and left the pier, but quickly decided to circle back and talk with the man.

His name was Daniel Al-Mateen,

I told him that as a friend of some of Brian’s band members, I knew that Brian would be warmed to hear about this solo performance on the Hudson, and that I was pretty sure I could get word to him. But I had a question: Why “In My Room,” in this place, on this day?

Mr. Al-Mateen said he had been feeling especially wistful about all the losses in his life as the years have passed. His mother, gone. His father, gone. His brother, gone. His sister, gone. His best friends, gone. His wife, gone.

So he put his keyboard and a power pack into a shopping cart and wheeled it out to the end of the pier. “In My Room,” he had long thought, was “so beautiful, so poignant in its seeming simplicity.” He wanted to remind himself that “the people we have loved may have left us, but they are with us forever, every time we think about them.”

“Do my dreaming and my scheming, lie awake and pray / Do my crying and my sighing, laugh at yesterday . . .”

I asked him about the setting: Why, with the private thoughts that were filling him, had he left his own room to come sing “In My Room” to the river?

“You don’t need a castle,” he said. “You just need a place where you can go to stay out of the maelstrom.”

I promised him I would find a way to let Brian know about his lovely rendition on this New York day.

“Please tell him thank you,” Mr. Al-Mateen said. “Please tell him thank you for everything.”

Mr. Greene’s books include “When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams.”