Music
Like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, The Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’, released sixty years ago this week, is saddled with the burden of GOAT status, not least because it features actual goats on the front cover. And like Welles before him, Brian Wilson never quite escaped the shadow of having created a masterpiece in his early twenties. Derek Taylor, then handling the Boys’ press, came up with the Brian Wilson Is A Genius tagline in 1966 to help push the album, a marketing concept that, at least in music PR terms, must be ranked among the most successful of all time. No tribute to Brian, following the announcement of his death in 2025, was without due (and valid) recitation.
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Back in late 1966, with ‘Good Vibrations’ dominating the charts, even Leonard Bernstein was on board, paying homage in a documentary that showed Brian alone at the piano, playing the as yet unreleased ‘Surfs Up’. By the time it aired, Brian and the Beach Boys were on the outs, Brian having scrapped ‘Smile’, the much anticipated follow up to ‘Pet Sounds’, and retreated to his house in Bel Air. It would take years for the Beach Boys to recover commercially, eventually becoming one of the biggest stadium acts of the 1970s, and creatively, while they would go on to make some of their greatest music in the years to come, they would never again recapture the glory of their golden period from 1964-66. It could be argued that Brian never fully recovered.
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In early 1966, while the other Beach Boys toured Japan, Brian Wilson assembled the best session musicians in LA, and an unknown advertising copywriter named Tony Asher, serving as lyricist, to create the suite of songs that became ‘Pet Sounds’. For Brian, the benchmark had been set at the end of 1965 with the US release of The Beatles ‘Rubber Soul’. While the Beatles had concocted that album mostly on the fly in a few weeks, working collaboratively with producer George Martin, Brian set out to compose, arrange and produce his response single handed. That it far exceeded and eclipsed everything before it in pop music became clear when Bruce Johnston played the album to the Beatles in London for the first time a few months later. While they sat in a hotel room, Lennon and McCartney were notably circumspect, listening closely. When it was over, they asked to hear it again. George Martin later wrote that Sgt Pepper, another GOAT-heavy record, was “an attempt to equal” ‘Pet Sounds’.
Capitol, the Boy’s label, didn’t know what to do with the end product, feeling it was uncommercial. This is evidenced in their somewhat slapdash handling of the album art, which features the boys awkwardly feeding goats in San Diego zoo (as opposed to, I don’t know, maybe Brian’s dogs Banana and Louie? Both of whom actually feature on the album). Despite this, the cover has become iconic by its proximity to the music. The cooper bold font and rich green and yellow colourway, paired with the kodachrome warm tones of the cover shot, have imbued the record with an idyllic innocence that belies the deeply melancholic songs it contains.
Over its thirteen tracks ‘Pet Sounds’ creates a sound world, almost tangible at times, that you can escape into. Opening with the full force, sunlit yearning optimism of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, it’s not long before the long shadows start setting in. The spectral opening of ‘You Still Believe In Me’, with its off kilter bicycle horn fade out, undercuts the innocence with its confession of some darker truth “after all I’ve done to you.” ‘That’s Not Me’ acknowledges failure set against the huge expectations young people are freighted with when they first try to strike out alone in the world. ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’, with its funereal atmosphere and heartbeat bassline, evokes intimacy of an almost too intense kind. ‘I’m Waiting For The Day’, for all its boisterousness, is underpinned by the brief string interlude just before the end, seeming to suggest the bad relationship referred to, and hint at the obsessiveness of the subject.
‘Let’s Go Away For A While’, the first of two instrumentals, is a dreamy detour, showcasing the complexity and originality of Wilson’s arrangements. Wrecking Crew stalwart Carol Kaye, whose muted bass playing features prominently (often paired with a stand up bass) throughout the album, recalled how Brian – with no formal training – would sometimes show up in the studio with handwritten charts for the musicians. “He wrote all his music but he’d bring it in and you could tell he wasn’t schooled at all. Some of the stems were on the wrong side of the notes and he’d write in odd keys.” A student and ardent admirer of Phil Spector (who did not reciprocate his admiration), Brian learned to build sound in the studio from unique composites of different instruments played together to create scale and depth. Building on Spector’s formalism, Brian further blurred the lines between classical and pop, pairing his arrangements with the multi-part harmonies he could hear fully formed in his head, to perfect what became known as baroque pop.
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Al Jardine, a fan of the Kingston Trio, suggested they cover the folk standard ‘Sloop John B’. The recurring motif that opens the track gives the audio impression of sunlight on water, and as the song becomes more strident in tone musically, the yearning to be off the godforsaken sloop and its atmosphere of overbearing dysfunction “Let me go home/I wanna go home” takes hold.
‘God Only Knows’, dealing directly with dependency, death and the cosmos by way of an exquisite lead vocal from 19 year old Carl Wilson, is another example of how Brian interweaves melodic motifs with harmony, and features in its closing overlapping vocal lines quite possibly the finest outro of any popular song. ‘I Know There’s An Answer’ (originally titled ‘Hang On To Your Ego’) along with ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ are the two most direct tracks, speaking to Brian’s sense of isolation within the group, and the tensions between its commercial and creative factions. The ruminative bass line in the latter is an example of how Brian foregrounds instruments as a counterpart to melody, suggesting the inner turmoil “Sometimes I feel very sad” the lyric articulates.
‘Here Today’, like ‘I’m Waiting For The Day’ uses a deceptively sprightly arrangement as a backdrop to the most openly cynical lyric on the album, sung fittingly by Mike Love. The title track, another instrumental, with it’s goofball exotica is the perfect sucker punch lead in to the closer ‘Caroline No’, on the surface a fairly straightforward song about a girl cutting her long hair short that becomes a devastating parable about lost youth “Could we ever bring em back/ Once they have gone?” and fades out to the sound of a passing train and the aforementioned dogs barking off in the suburban distance.
Like Kane, ‘Pet Sounds’ was the work of a prodigious talent able to overcome all of the pressures they were under for one brief moment, to create an indelible work of stunning originality. And as with Welles, that work cast a long shadow that Brian Wilson could never fully get out from under. The long shadows and bright sunlight of Pet Sounds evoke a fleeting moment in time that we can all inhabit, that moment when youth gives way to adulthood. By giving us permission to revisit that time in all its emotional complexity whenever we please, Pet Sounds has earned its GOAT status many times over.
Neil Brogan is a musician from Belfast. His latest single ‘Joys of Spring’ is out now.