100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Wouldn’t It Be Nice

02 You Still Believe in Me

03 That’s Not Me

04 Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)

05 I’m Waiting for the Day

06 Let’s Go Away for a While

07 Sloop John B

08 God Only Knows

09 I Know There’s an Answer

10 Here Today

11 I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times

12 Pet Sounds

13 Caroline, No

In December 1965 Brian Wilson, the 23-year-old Californian genius behind the Beach Boys’ run of surf and hotrod hit singles, heard Rubber Soul by the Beatles and experienced a moment of epiphany. ‘Marilyn, I’m gonna make the greatest album! The greatest rock album ever made!’ he exclaimed to his wife, and within six months he had come close to doing that. Pet Sounds, a coming of age triumph for Wilson, for the West Coast scene, and for subsequent generations of the young and those who remember youth all too well, remains a masterpiece.

It was just four years since the Beach Boys had released their debut single, ‘Surfin’, but Wilson was already in a state of flux. In 1964, after anxiety attacks brought on by the group’s hellacious schedule, he withdrew from touring and took up in the studio with session musicians who could deliver what he was hearing in his head. The Beach Boys were becoming two bands; one version was out touring the world while Wilson was focused on his version, determined to make a definitive album instead of padding out hit singles with quickly cut filler to deliver another quarterly release.

Wilson’s key collaborator on Pet Sounds was lyricist Tony Asher, with whom he co-wrote the majority of the album in early 1966. The pair created a world of lost innocence; one that would be as relevant for the transformation of the 1960s as the move from the teenage years to adulthood. There’s no generational conflict on Pet Sounds, no clearing of the decks. ‘I’m a little bit scared because I haven’t been home in a long time,’ runs ‘That’s Not Me’, and the song turns homesickness into a kind of heavenly reverie. Pet Sounds would help revolutionise rock & roll, but the world it creates is neither rock & roll nor revolutionary.

The rest of the band – Wilson’s brothers Carl and Dennis, his cousin Mike Love and high school friend Al Jardine – were on tour in Japan when the tracks were cut, with more than 60 guest players involved. They returned to provide vocals and tender harmonies to a pop symphony, a melodic wall of sound that used guitars and strings, drums and horns, harpsichord, piano and even a theremin. Tinged with melancholy, the arrangements took in the proto-psychedelia of ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’, the eclectic soundscape of ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’, and an invocation of childhood on ‘You Still Believe in Me’.

Some of Wilson’s bandmates, particularly the vituperative Love, doubted the material’s direction, but they were on hand to wend their voices across these songs, resulting in some of popular music’s most beautifully realised songs. When the swell of voices permeates ‘God Only Knows’ it sounds heartbreakingly original, and throughout the album the accumulation of vocal parts adds a tragic gravity to these celestial tunes. Even the sweetest of teenage soliloquies, ‘Here Today’, foretells how quickly loss can arrive.

On the closing ‘Caroline, No’ a girl who has shed her long hair and youthful glow is rhapsodised, and that’s a portent of the era about to begin. But Pet Sounds sits apart from any one time. Like other masterful American composers, Wilson’s dedication was to his music, not its social significance. ‘I’ve been trying hard to find the people/That I won’t leave behind,’ Brian Wilson sings on ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’, and it wouldn’t be his family or bandmates that would ultimately stick with him. It was the listeners who heard Pet Sounds as a record for the ages.