{"id":747267,"date":"2026-08-23T15:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/747267\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T15:00:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T15:00:13","slug":"the-track-paul-mccartney-crowned-the-greatest-song-ever-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/747267\/","title":{"rendered":"The track Paul McCartney crowned \u201cthe greatest song ever written\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"10<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Album Covers \/ Paul McCartney<\/p>\n

Sun 23 August 2026 10:57, UK <\/p>\n

Much like Colonel Sanders complimenting your crispy chicken or Johnny Cash giving kudos to your quiff, getting the nod from Paul McCartney<\/a> for your music is as glowing an endorsement as there is. That praise is propelled to the loftiest perch of all when the former Beatle proclaims that you have accomplished \u201cthe greatest song ever written\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, there are some pieces of music so astounding that even a blackbird would have to pause its own twittering to say, \u2018Well, isn\u2019t that pretty\u2019. When you manage to combine that beauty with an evolution so pioneering that the world will be left forever reeling, then every plaudit ever pronounced is just as natural as the sea lapping against the shore.<\/p>\n

That is the case when it comes to the revolutionary opus of the 1960s, \u2018God Only Knows\u2019 by The Beach Boys. Released in 1966, its impact was irrevocable and instant. To lean on the trusted sage of \u2018Macca\u2019 once more, The Beatle once decreed, \u201c\u2018God Only Knows\u2019 is one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it. It\u2019s really just a love song, but it\u2019s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian [Wilson]<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, \u2018just\u2018 a love song does it a disservice, with Wilson purposefully conceiving it as a love song by and large written for God. <\/p>\n

All the same, McCartney makes up for it as his glowing praise continues, \u201cI\u2019ve actually performed it with him, and I\u2019m afraid to say that during the soundcheck, I broke down. It was just too much to stand there singing this song that does my head in and to stand there singing it with Brian.\u201d <\/p>\n

While this teary-eyed tale might have been a barnstorming quote for the late Wilson to bring up at parties, perhaps the finest testimony to the strength of the Beach Boys\u2019 pioneering anthem is in how much it impacted McCartney\u2019s work moving forward, and everyone else\u2019s, for that matter.<\/p>\n

Although McCartney\u2019s might be a very personal corroboration, the song is the sort that beckons equal awe from everyone who ever beholds it, regardless of whether you\u2019ve been lucky enough to sing it with Wilson. Beyond the brilliance, there is something in the Pet Sounds masterpiece that is still reverberating in every song you will ever hear following its release.<\/p>\n

You see, prior to 1961, albums were all recorded in mono. Stereo, as we know it, simply didn\u2019t exist. The linear sonic rendering of mono technology left people wanting. Sure, it could capture the sound of a symphony orchestra, but it was like a 2D painting without any perspective. All the depth was lost, and every instrument was front and centre. A Sunday Roast is still technically the same meal when you put it in a blender, but it\u2019s better when you keep it as its constituent parts. This more appealing separation was served up by the advent of stereo sound.<\/p>\n

While the Beach Boys weren\u2019t the progenitors of this with \u2018God Only Knows\u2019, it was the song that utilised it best. It made pop baroque thanks to the complex way they deployed it as an instrument rather than a tool. With separate tracks composing the sound, the tonal elements are layered in such a way that the song doesn\u2019t really have a singular key. This was hitherto unknown in pop. As Wilson said himself, \u201cIt\u2019s the only song I\u2019ve written that\u2019s not in a definite key, and I\u2019ve written hundreds of songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond being a keyless composition, it is also devoid of conventional instrumentation in some aspects, too. \u201cI tried to mix different instruments together to make a third sound,\u201c he told Fresh Air back in 1998, \u201cLike organ and a piano mixed together to make a third sound. I just did a lot of mixing of instruments together. And I used echo very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Brian<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n

This subverting of musical forms was achieved, in part, by channelling a three-track recording of the instrumental onto a single channel of an eight-track tape to allow for seven overdubs and vocal takes to be added to the mix if needed. In layman\u2019s terms, which are pretty difficult terms to achieve when it comes to something this complex, everything you hear is, in effect, harmonised with itself to create a more immersive sound. <\/p>\n

This meant that the band could tinker with fine details, using the studio itself as an instrument. This allowed them to not just simply record the instruments and lay them on top of each other once levelled out, but to fiddle with the interplay, so that billowing French horns in staccato could sit under soft vocal croons in legato. <\/p>\n

However, while the temptation when splitting the music atom might be to turn it into something obtusely futuristic, the Beach Boys harked back in a more classical direction. Wilson put this down to the impact of his co-lyricist, Tony Asher, reflecting, \u201cI think Tony had a musical influence on me somehow. After about ten years, I started thinking about it deeper [\u2026] because I had never written that kind of song.\u201d <\/p>\n

He even likened \u2018God Only Knows\u2019 to a jazz standard popularised<\/a> in the 1940s. \u201cI remember him talking about \u2018Stella by Starlight\u2019,\u201d he said of Asher\u2019s influence, \u201cAnd he had a certain love for classic songs.\u201d Yet, even in the world of jazz and baroque, the musical structure, with its non-diatonic chords, coupled with a few familiar harmonics, and an atonal centre, had never really been done before. <\/p>\n

However, the brilliance is that even though the song might have all of that studio wizardry in the welter, and more tricks than a lawyer in The Magic Circle, it is subsumed in pure beauty so that the listener can skip along its strange contours with butter-cutting ease. You\u2019re swept up in the emotion of it rather than the musicology, like assailing Everest in an elevator so breezily that you marvel at the views rather than the mechanics.<\/p>\n

This comes down to the post-modernist collision of simply sublime songwriting and the science that not only propelled it to new heights of studio capabilities but informed the process of creativity itself along the way. This, ultimately, defines Brian Wilson\u2019s artful awesomeness. As Bob Dylan declared<\/a>, \u201cJesus that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn\u2019t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is this scintillating seamlessness that sends the song soaring \u2013 it\u2019s all about melody. Dissecting the magnificence of the melody seems almost beyond the point, like magnifying the Mona Lisa to check out the brush strokes. The pinnacle of the track is that never before has a song of such technical brilliance appeared to have been written with such ease. In fact, that\u2019s almost how Wilson defined it: as pure inspiration.<\/p>\n

\"Paul<\/a>Credit: Paul McCartney<\/p>\n

Which brings to mind the great songwriter Hoagy Carmichael\u2019s view on the creative process of music at its best. \u201cAnd then it happened,\u201c he mused, \u201cthat queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn\u2019t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, \u2018maybe I didn\u2019t write you, but I found you\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while that is one of the most beautiful corroborations of how the creative process works \u2013 and it also ties in with the notion that Wilson had God in mind as an inspiration when he was writing the anthem \u2013 the aural history of the process is more akin to Dr Frankenstein\u2019s procedure. The Beach Boys found a song floating in the ether, lassoed it down with alchemical art, and then deconstructed and turned it into something new that would become the guidebook on how to do it for millions of others to follow forevermore.<\/p>\n

Within months, Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham was likening its impact to revolutionary classical compositions. \u201cI think that Pet Sounds is the most progressive album of the year inasmuch as Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s Scheherazade was. It\u2019s the pop equivalent of that, a complete exercise in pop music.\u201d And like many, he saw \u2018God Only Knows\u2019 as its shimmer jewel. <\/p>\n

Of course, things may well have unravelled very much the same if \u2018God Only Knows\u2019 didn\u2019t exist, but in the lineage of its legacy, you would have to say that without the song, there would be no Sgt Pepper and it wasn\u2019t only McCartney who called it the world\u2019s greatest song, even Lennon said when it was released that the \u201cworld perked up\u201d, his son Sean likened it to \u201centering another world\u201c, and as Jackson Browne said with a smile<\/a>, \u201cImagine a band influencing The Beatles!\u201d <\/p>\n

There is music before \u2018God Only Knows\u2019 and there is music after it. It gave birth to Pet Sounds, and everyone followed in its advanced footsteps. As McCartney would say, \u201cI figure no one is educated musically \u2019til they\u2019ve heard Pet Sounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, \u2018God Only Knows\u2019 is a song that shaped the second half of the 20th century and beyond. And we can all be thankful for that because it is the sort of beautiful utopia where prettiness unrivalled revels in progress and stirs us all with the same simple loveliness as a sunny day. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Album Covers \/ Paul McCartney Sun 23 August 2026 10:57, UK Much like Colonel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":747268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[19405,186263,84828,96,128,6470,131986,15745,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-747267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1960s","tag-186263","tag-counterculture","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-paul-mccartney","tag-pet-sounds","tag-the-beach-boys","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}