Complex music with a simple point: When you’re young, everything hits with the weight of an orchestra.
Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys
20
Brian Wilson’s arrangements brought a complexity to rock music that nobody had heard before, but they also captured a simple, poetic point: When you’re young, everything hits with the weight of an orchestra. At a moment when bands like The Velvet Underground were starting to use pop to explore bracing realities, Pet Sounds reached back to the fantasies of ’30s pop and ’50s exotica, of old Hollywood and early television. And as sacred as the album’s mood is (Wilson called his next project, Smile, a “teenage symphony to God”), it makes sense that its co-lyricist, Tony Asher, had come from advertising: Despite the ambition, Wilson also knew he needed to project something neat, immediate and universal.
“It really made people understand that an album can be an incredible journey.”
Graham Nash
Of all Pet Sounds’ legacies, the most profound is the idea that pop music—something accessible and extroverted—could be used to express deep, internal worlds. Wilson’s experiments with LSD aren’t obvious in any garish way, but you can hear him trying to excavate feelings buried so deep that seeking them out is an adventure on par with any.