For most of my adult life, I haven’t been someone who cried often. It’s not a masculinity thing—that’s never mattered much to me. I don’t feel weird about telling friends I love them, giving them a warm embrace or sharing my insecurities, and perhaps that vulnerability can still come across as guarded. But my natural demeanor is low-key and easy-going, a quality that’s been an asset as a journalist—I tend to think I put interview subjects at ease—and during some of the most trying crises of young adulthood.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I began to notice a change. On an otherwise uneventful weekday morning I found myself tearing up while listening to Angel Olsen’s “Windows,” a song that’s delicate and beautiful in its simple message to find a positive ray of light to hang onto. I can’t explain exactly why it hit me so directly in that moment and burrowed directly into a part of myself that even I never see, but I couldn’t fight it. That cool exterior was starting to fracture, and I began to notice those high-pressure emotional leaks happening more often. Like whenever I watch Anya try and frustratedly fail to understand death and grieving in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “The Body.” Or when Tina shows up to Louise’s poetry reading on Bob’s Burgers‘ “The Plight Before Christmas.” I barely held it together while recently watching Ratboys perform the title track of their last album The Window, and then on the drive home felt that same catch in my throat when I heard Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It.” It’s a weird thing to suddenly find yourself hostage to an image or a timbre or a melody or a harmony. I should probably be used to it now, but I’m still adjusting to this relatively new norm.
When I saw Brian Wilson perform The Beach Boys‘ landmark 1966 album Pet Sounds in its entirety in San Diego in 2016, however, I knew what was coming, and yet I still wasn’t prepared for it. For the first 11 songs, the legendary Beach Boys songwriter, backed by a band that also featured his former bandmate Al Jardine, kept it light and breezy, flipping through the group’s catalog of songs both beachy (“California Girls”) and baroque (“Heroes and Villains”), even leading a sing-along of “Row Your Boat” before kicking off the main event with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” In fact, he even rowed that very boat again just before “God Only Knows.” But once he sang that opening line—”I may not always love you/But as long as there are stars above you…“—my defenses collapsed on that warm summer evening, the dam not so much breaking as springing a leak that I haven’t been able to successfully patch.
If the songs Wilson wrote for [Pet Sounds‘] planned follow-up, Smile, were teenage symphonies to God, as he famously said, the songs on Pet Sounds comprise an operetta of disillusionment.
A quick survey on social media of friends and colleagues who attended the show reported very much the same thing. Brian Wilson, his voice weathered from age and decades of trauma, could still evoke such powerful emotional reactions in cynical millennial and Gen-X musicians and journalists. Pet Sounds, Wilson’s greatest achievement in a career of many highs, has that power.
There are millions, billions of words written about Pet Sounds for its innovations in pop-song arrangements and lyrical introspection—all of which are true. (Except for the ones decrying it as overrated, but such is the burden of a legendary set of music.) In that sense, it’s much like The Beatles’ Revolver, released that same year, one of two 1966 albums that forever changed the landscape of pop music and whose influence remains palpable in music made more than 50 years later. In fact, the two artists played a ping-ponging game of influencing each other, Wilson first taking inspiration from The Beatles’ own Rubber Soul, and then Paul McCartney being inspired to write “Here, There and Everywhere” after hearing “God Only Knows.”
There are perhaps just as many but arguably still not enough about how this is a record about feelings more than chord charts, about being saved by love and love that can’t be saved—about the unbearable weight of the world and perhaps the even more unbearable chasm of one’s own self worth. If the songs Wilson wrote for its planned follow-up, Smile, were teenage symphonies to God, as he famously said, the songs on Pet Sounds comprise an operetta of disillusionment. But it’s one still kissed by a Pacific Ocean breeze, carrying a sweetness that prevents it from ever tumbling into full-blown bummer.
In the early 1960s, Hawthorne, California’s Beach Boys—featuring brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, along with cousin Mike Love—became hitmakers on a string of singles that celebrated a beachy Southern California lifestyle. Their first three albums each feature “Surf” in the title, and two more include the word “Summer.” Though by only a few years in, Wilson’s aptitude for more intricate arrangements began to show through highlights like “All Summer Long,” and on standouts such as “In My Room,” he even showcased the kind of vulnerability and introspection that permeated the ballads of Pet Sounds. In hindsight, Pet Sounds seems inevitable, Wilson cultivating an open wound salted with baroque pop arrangements, but there’s something strangely intangible about its effect on a listener, something that’s better felt than analyzed.
The creative direction of Brian Wilson has led to frequent mention of Pet Sounds as being a solo album—a suggestion that’s both indisputable truth and miles from it. The album saw Wilson—increasingly dabbling in cannabis and psychedelics use—taking nearly complete creative control over the project, with songs that traveled far afield from the group’s typical fun-in-the-sun fare. Even its exotica-tinged instrumentals like “Let’s Go Away for a While” carry an undercurrent of melancholy, while the one song that very literally features the ocean as its mise-en-scène, a cover of Jamaican folk standard “Sloop John B,” is as much a litany of disappointment and dejection as anything else here. It’s single, “Caroline, No,” was even released as a Brian Wilson solo track, further reinforcing the idea of this being entirely a record of Wilson’s own vision.
And yet the album is a grand undertaking, featuring string and horn arrangements and dozens of musicians, including the famed session group The Wrecking Crew, which included bassist Carol Kaye, drummer Hal Blaine, and guitarist and country artist Glen Campbell, who took over Wilson’s vocal duties when the group’s leader ceased touring. Not to mention the countless curious details that arise throughout its 36 minutes: the harp plucks that open “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”; the bicycle horn that honks at the close of “You Still Believe In Me”; the Theremin solo on “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.”
Pet Sounds is also propelled by the same driving force behind every prior Beach Boys album: the mesmerizing, intricate harmonies of the Beach Boys themselves. Despite the oft-mentioned lore of tension behind the scenes, Wilson’s change of direction on Pet Sounds took some getting used to for most members of the Beach Boys, but didn’t create major rifts, at least not initially. And Carl insisted that the group loved the album, despite suggestions to the contrary. Yet Mike Love was the most vocally averse to scrapping the easy pop hooks for something more nuanced and complex. “Mike’s a formula hound – if it doesn’t have a hook in it, if he can’t hear a hook in it, he doesn’t want to know about it,” Jardine said in an interview with Goldmine in 2000. However, Love was the only member who was consulted by Wilson and likewise heard early versions of the songs, which Wilson played for him over the phone.
Yet regardless of who we literally hear on Pet Sounds, we’re hearing Brian, whose own private world was increasingly growing unsteady as his marriage was falling apart and drug use was growing more frequent. At times it sounds hopeful, as on opener “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”, which paints a picture of domestic bliss: “Wouldn’t it be nice to live together/In the kind of world where we belong?” But the subtext is what’s not being said, at least not so explicitly. As a friend of mine once retorted, “It would be nice—but it ain’t gonna happen.”
From there the feelings of sadness and inadequacy only intensify, highlighting things we perhaps all see in ourselves even if we’d rather not acknowledge them. “You Still Believe In Me” never fails to wreck me, underlining its confessions of low self-worth with gentle expressions of love and gratitude toward someone still providing the kind of support we all seek: “I know perfectly well I’m not where I should be/I’ve been very aware you’ve been patient with me.” By contrast, Wilson is the one providing support on the sweetly melancholy “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)”. In closing side A with “Sloop John B,” the members of the group all get a chance to shine, swapping verses and engaging in the kind of group sing-along that connects it more directly to previous Beach Boys releases. Yet for how upbeat and joyous it feels, the overall takeaway is one of frustration and futility: “I feel so broke up, I wanna go home.”
A plink of organ and burst of French horn in the intro of “God Only Knows” kicks off the album’s second side, and with it, a complete 180-degree turn from the optimistic hopelessness of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” That it opens with the line “I may not always love you” suggests a kind of bleak resignation, but it’s the kind of head fake we also hear in a song like George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” For the rest of the first verse—”...but as long as there are stars above you/You need never to doubt it/I’ll make you so sure about it“—confirms that only the death of the universe itself would derail that devotion. It’s a heartachingly sweet song that merely sounds sad, a ray of light emanating from a field of despair—if it makes McCartney choke up, what chance would I have?
Yet just as Wilson and company allow that drop of sweetness to ripple, the bitterness returns. “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” my personal favorite song on the album, glides on the wheeze of a harmonium as Wilson laments a timeline connected by disappointment after disappointment: “Each time things start to happen again/I think I got something going good for myself/But what goes wrong.” Decades later that very song scored one of the greatest moments in scripted television, the backdrop of a scene on Mad Men where Roger Stirling takes LSD with his wife Jane before their own marriage comes to its inevitable end. And on closing track “Caroline, No”—originally titled “Carol, I Know,” named for collaborator and lyricist Tony Asher’s ex-girlfriend, with whom he had recently broken up—the love that buoyed a broken man is ultimately gone for good: “Where is the girl I used to know? How could you lose that happy glow?“
There’s a certain interpretation of Pet Sounds as a concept album about a relationship that eventually comes to an end, though in its meticulous encapsulation of the spectrum of human emotion, it’s not nearly that linear. The estrangement in “Caroline, No” is evident from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” but not necessarily in “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)” or “God Only Knows.” It’s an album about breakups in some sense, but it’s also about love, growing up and learning to understand yourself—your failures, faults and all. It’s maybe pop music’s most beautifully written document of personal frailties and insecurities, and if it makes you cry, well, you’re only human.
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
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