Pet Sounds — 1966

Background

Pet Sounds was written and produced almost entirely by Brian Wilson, who had stopped touring with The Beach Boys the previous year to focus on writing and studio work, reportedly inspired in part by hearing The Beatles' Rubber Soul and wanting to make an album that held together as a complete artistic statement rather than a collection of singles. Wilson brought in the same session musicians who played on major Phil Spector productions, assembling arrangements far more harmonically and orchestrally ambitious than anything the band's surf-pop image had suggested they were capable of.

Sound

'Wouldn't It Be Nice' opens the album with layered vocal harmonies and an unusual instrumental palette including accordion and mandolin, setting a tone of yearning optimism that the rest of the album complicates and deepens. 'God Only Knows' is frequently singled out as one of the most beautifully constructed pop songs ever written, built on a French horn intro and a structure that avoids a traditional chorus entirely. Wilson's production style layered unconventional instruments — bicycle bells, dog whistles, and Coca-Cola cans among them — into dense, symphonic pop arrangements that took the band's vocal-harmony sound in an entirely new direction.

Themes

Where the band's earlier records celebrated surfing, cars and teenage romance in mostly uncomplicated terms, Pet Sounds is preoccupied with loss, uncertainty and the anxiety of growing up — 'I Just Wasn't Made for These Times' and 'I Know There's an Answer' both grapple openly with alienation and self-doubt in a way pop music rarely had at the time. The album closes on 'Caroline, No', a stripped-back, melancholy meditation on lost innocence that ends the record on a note of quiet resignation rather than a big finish.

Legacy

Pet Sounds initially underperformed commercially in the US relative to the band's previous singles-driven success, though it fared better in the UK, but its critical reputation has only grown since — Paul McCartney has pointed to it as a direct influence on The Beatles' own subsequent studio ambitions, and it's now consistently ranked among the greatest albums ever made. Its influence on the idea of the album as a unified artistic statement, rather than a collection of potential singles, runs through virtually every ambitious pop and rock record that followed it.