Credit: Far Out / Caribou Records / Public Domain
Tue 28 July 2026 22:00, UK
In the mid 1960s, the world was marvelling at The Beatles’ endless pursuit of songwriting and brazenly claimed that not a single person in the world was writing music as good as them.
I’m not here to argue with that. As a Beatles fan, there’s no part of me that is going to start on one of the most annoying crusades in all of music: the false narrative that The Beatles were, in some shape or form, overrated. But the idea that no one was writing music like them is something I take umbrage with, for there was one name who quietly guided The Beatles into their state of experimental genius.
The year was 1966, and The Beatles were slowly shifting to their more innovative musical state while simultaneously looking to call time on their touring careers. Revolver was a triumphant introduction to that and may have just been the album of the year, if it wasn’t for The Beach Boys releasing Pet Sounds.
Their symphonic masterpiece represented the very peak of songwriting arrangement and even now, over half a century on, hasn’t really been topped. It was the blueprint for The Beatles’ ‘67 record Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and ultimately did away with this idea that only they could create magic; suddenly, the idea was flipped on its head, and Wilson was the songwriter penning songs no one else would dare.
With something as unique as ‘God Only Knows’, Wilson established a style for himself that no one could ever top, not even Paul McCartney. While he drove himself absolutely insane arranging the song and Pet Sounds as a whole, there was something innate about the melody, almost like it fell from the sky.
Wilson, despite all of his idiosyncrasies, had suddenly become the master writer of the love song. But it was through the lens of Pet Sounds that fans could suddenly go back and reimagine some of The Beach Boys’ songwriting to realise that there are multiple songs which feel unique to Wilson.
Like ‘Please Let Me Wonder’, which was even more unashamed about romance than anything on Pet Sounds. “I recorded that at four o’clock in the morning in 1964,” Wilson remembered, two years before his opus.
Further reading: From The Vault
He continued, “I finished it at 7:30 in the morning… At the very end, I went, ‘I love you’, at the end of the song. Hardly anybody in the world ever says, I love you on record, you know? So that was an original idea of mine. Yeah, it was spontaneous. I just thought of doing it, real spontaneous.”
Wilson’s process shows he was already developing signs of experimentalism. While ‘Please Let Me Wonder’ was largely conventional and had nothing of the Pet Sounds ambition, the very fact that Wilson identified that musicians were refusing to include ‘I love you’ as a phrase, he saw a unique opportunity. Thereafter, the floodgates opened, and the music world was soon treated to one of the most influential albums of all time.
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