LogFAQs > #956289928

107. The Beach Boys God Only Knows (1966)
from the album Pet Sounds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0lj3WX_5ps

Like most of The Beach Boys greatest hits, the complexity of God Only Knows is often overlooked in the popular conscious. Brian Wilson has a phenomenal talent to make dense instrumentation and odd key choices appear effortless. There are well over a dozen instruments features on this track, and they all play a key part while fusing into a cohesive Wall of Sound. You can pick out the sleigh bells and clip-clop percussion if you pay close attention, but it is just as easy to let these stray sounds meld into one. From the beginning, The Beach Boys were celebrated for their close vocal harmonies; with God Only Knows, they successfully applied that close arrangement to a massive soundscape.

This colossal backdrop serves to heighten the vocal performance. Carl Wilson sings alone for the first minute, but then other voices rise together during an interlude. The song then sets back into Carl alone; with how iconic God Only Knows is for its harmonies, its striking how much of this consists of a lone voice. The finale is just that grandiose, with Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, and Bruce Johnston singing in rounds, each vocalist seemingly struggling to outdo one another and get in the last word. Few popular songs have ever achieved such seamlessly intricate design.

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