2 Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys Capitol, 1966
“who’s gonna hear this shit?” Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band’s resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. “The ears of a dog?” Years later Wilson observed, “Ironically, Mike’s barb inspired the album’s title.”
Barking dogs — Wilson’s dog Banana among them, in fact — are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on their 1967 opus, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a gesture that completed a circle of influence beginning when Wilson initially conceived Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. With its vivid orchestration, lyrical ambition, elegant pacing, and thematic coherence, Pet Sounds invented — and, in several senses, perfected — the notion that an album could be more than the sum of its parts. When Wilson sang, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older,” on the album’s magnificent opening song, he wasn’t just imagining a love that could evolve past high school, he was suggesting a new grown-up identity for rock & roll music itself.
Wilson made Pet Sounds without the rest of the band, using them only to flesh out the vocal arrangements. He even considered putting the album out as a solo project, and the first single, “Caroline, No,” was released under his own name. The personal nature of the songs, which Wilson co-wrote primarily with lyricist Tony Asher, further distinguished the album from the Beach Boys’ previous hits. Its luxurious sound conveys a heartbreaking wistfulness, as songs such as “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “I’m Waiting for the Day” bid farewell to the innocent world of the early Sixties.
The album’s centerpiece is “God Only Knows,” arranged with harpsichord, horns, sleigh bells, and strings to create a spiritual feeling Wilson later compared to “being blind, but in being blind, you can see more. You close your eyes; you’re able to see a place or something that’s happening.” In the years to come, countless artists would live in his vision.