Moving forward, he would make the backing tracks, while the rest of the band took care of the touring. Wilson had figured out that songs weren’t enough production was critical. He had quit the road after a mid-flight anxiety attack in 1964, and had come to depend upon a loose collective of Los Angeles session musicians, first assembled by Wilson’s idol, Phil Spector. It would be another decade before Wilson composed a concept album of his own. But the songs themselves predated the split they were standards, written at different times by different people, and curated to match Sinatra’s mood. Wilson’s bildungsroman about the life and death of adolescent love wasn’t just a great record: It was also a record of a great artist’s mind-popular music’s first long-form investigation into the psyche of an auteur.īefore Pet Sounds, there was Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955)-a kind of concept album informed by the singer’s recent break from Ava Gardner. (Wilson, his fans will delight in reminding you, carbonated classical music with pop.) But if the big-budget artistic statement is now back-if it’s okay to be preposterously ambitious again-the current moment owes something to the pretensions of Pet Sounds.

Such “rockism” persisted from the 1960s to the 2000s, and during this time, albums fortified by theme, like Pet Sounds, were thought to be more “serious” than one-off singles.īrian Wilson, who wrote Pet Sounds, certainly anticipated the modern pop-centric era, which privileges producer over artist and blurs the line between entertainment and art. Over time, however, Pet Sounds came to occupy the upper echelons of best-of lists-or at least, the lists in magazines like Rolling Stone and Mojo that tended to prefer rock over other genres (and white, male artists over everyone else). (a worried Capitol Records even rushed out a package of greatest hits, as if to recall to the public the fun, foamy band behind “Surfin’ USA”). Popular music’s first big, coherent statement-The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, released 50 years ago on May 16, 1966-wasn’t an immediate sensation, at least in the U.S.

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