| | |  Entertainment | September 2008 
Wilson's Pet Project Influential in Pop Music
 Jeff Harford - Otago Daily Times
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The 66-year-old Brian Wilson that slavers creepily over surfer girls and Mexican maids on recent solo release That Lucky Old Sun is a very different artist from the one who brought us Pet Sounds (1966). For one thing, he'd traded in his board-shorts for something far more fetching.
Wilson had quit touring with the Beach Boys in 1965, the personal pressures that would feed his developing detachment and depression beginning to surface.
He preferred to focus on songwriting and recording, enlisting the help of lyricist Tony Asher to create the superstructure for the band's ninth studio album.
When the other Beach Boys returned from touring Japan and Hawaii to lay down their vocal tracks, Wilson put them immediately on the back foot. In the absence of trademark good-time ditties about cars, girls and waves, they were nonplussed.
Mercifully, Wilson got his way with most things. Pet Sounds has subsequently been name-checked by every major pop act to be awed by its flawless stacked harmonies and (for the times) quirky instrumentation.
Released originally as a monophonic recording, the album employed many of the "Wall of Sound" techniques developed by Wilson's mentor and rival Phil Spector.
Multiple instruments and doubled-up guitar and bass lines were bounced down to a single track, with six of the remaining seven tracks dedicated to each vocal and the last kept free for add-ons.
Among the classic songs to emerge were Wouldn't It Be Nice, God Only Knows, I'm Waiting For The Day, Sloop John B, and Caroline, No. They touch on the innocence of youth, its subsequent loss, and the mercurial nature of obsessive love.
But perhaps the most revealing track is I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, of which Wilson has said: "It's about a guy who was crying out because he was too advanced, and that he'd eventually have to leave people behind. All my friends thought I was crazy to do Pet Sounds." |
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