The One Word We Hear in Pet Sounds
There is a certain kind of song that comes to us from beyond the world. That is, it comes from elsewhere, but happens here, on our instruments, in our voices, using the same fourteen notes we always use—only this song is not like the others. The great majority of our songs and albums of music are only trying to live in the here and now, and (to the extent we can understand them) express this or that feeling or desire, tell a small story, or perhaps affirm some sort of moral value. In other words, they are the stuff of daily life, tunes to clothe, or perhaps distract us from, the world in which we live. But the other kind of music breaks in on us right in the midst of things, and carries our inner life elsewhere: as Yeats once said, “While I stand on the roadway, or in pavements grey, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
The Beach Boys’ great 1966 album, Pet Sounds, is this kind of music. In the midst of a decade full of this-worldly life and excitement, a decade with more than its share of hit singles celebrating whatever was going on, Pet Sounds spoke a single word to the heart’s core, a word variegated into 13 different songs. The one word intoned throughout Pet Sounds expresses one desire: the longing that is always there just under the surface of quotidian experience, the part of us that calls out for the Infinite. There are other things to be said about the album of course, much of it interesting and important, but we care about the recording history, instrumentation, ambient drug culture, and so on, because of this deeper quality of yearning.
Pet Sounds gives voice to the desire of all hearts in a few different modes. The first and perhaps best known song on the album, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” approaches the pined-for Infinite within the framework of young love. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?,” asks the imagined lover of his beloved—to “say goodnight and stay together,” instead of having to part company at day’s end. So far, this is just classic teenage feeling, albeit in a quaint, mid-century key. In the second chorus, though, the longing for permanent presence slips easily into a still understandable, but frankly impossible desire: given the “happy times together we’ve been spending, / I wish that every kiss was never-ending . . . / Wouldn’t it be nice?” A never-ending kiss, as unpleasant as the act would be in actual, temporal human practice, is nevertheless the very thing the young lover most wants. In this song, Brian Wilson (the Beach Boy who single-handedly composed all the music, and co-wrote all the lyrics) reaches out through a familiar paradigm for a love that does not end—a love not to be found among other finite creatures. Wilson himself had been married for a few years at this time, and knew well enough all that human love cannot be, but he still had to express the desire. Hence the appropriateness of the music’s paradoxically exuberant melancholy. This brief song bounces along with the joyous energy of teenage eros, but the ghostly arpeggios of the Intro, the wistful doo-wop harmonies above the central melody-line, the horns and baritone sax that growl beneath, and the penultimate slow-down section, all gently undercut that energy, making this nothing if not a sad happy song. Unending love is the thing we most want, but where are we to find it? As the German poet Novalis put it, “we seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.”
What “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” drives toward more optimistically—an unending love—several other tracks pursue with varying degrees of angst and despair. The fifth piece, “I’m Waiting for the Day,” is about exactly that, waiting: the lover swears he will be true, and is only “waiting for the day when you [the heartbroken beloved] can love again.” The tune features energetic, confident choruses, suggesting a faith that the beloved will come around, but the ritardando with strings before the Outro establishes some moodier ambiguity, and the whole song remains in the terrain of expectation. “Here Today,” the album’s tenth track, more cynically traces the bound-to-fail trajectory of romance: “You’ve got to keep in mind love is here today / And it’s gone tomorrow. / It’s here and gone so fast.” But the untroubled buoyancy of the chorus melody is complicated, as so often in Pet Sounds, by the darker suggestions of its musical surroundings—the cinematic bridge with its galloping, slightly dissonant surf guitar, for example, feels more tense and desperate than smug or worldly-wise. We still feel the temporariness of earthy love as a problem—the problem. And then there is the final piece on the album: “Caroline, No” is often taken to reflect Wilson’s sense of his own marriage’s failure. The short, chorusless song is a tissue of rhetorical questions, all sorting through the inexplicable end of a love: “Who took that look away? / I remember how you used to say / You’d never change, but that’s not true.” As John Henry Newman once said, “here below, to live is to change,” and that makes love between finite creatures continually dissatisfying. There must be more.
In other parts of Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys pursue the infinite desire under different names. In the seventh track, “Sloop John B,” we hear the voice of a Caribbean sailor telling his sea story, with every verse and chorus concluding in the same pathetic plea: “Well, I feel so broke up / I want to go home.” The cheerfulness of the musical setting, with its driving downbeat rhythm and signature multi-part harmonies, makes the sense of dislocation less bitter, but the desire for home—a true Augustinian restlessness—never stops its insistent echoing. The eleventh song arouses the same sentiment, but with more melancholy shading: in the verses, Brian Wilson’s persona is “looking for a place to fit in,” a place “where I can speak my mind,” which means finding “the people / That I won’t leave behind.” There is not a fit for him anywhere in this world. “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times,” he croons, but the dark reediness of the track’s woodwind accompaniment, and the otherworldly electro-theramin solo toward the end, leave us with the distinct impression that he—like all of us—wasn’t made for any one time. Only the timeless will do, or some unimaginable conjunction of timelessness and time. There, the Sloop John B will finally be home.
A final mode in which the album expresses the one desire comes out in what is perhaps its most perfectly crafted piece, track #4: “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).” The song is ironically a set of words enjoining against words. The lover wants to know the beloved through other signs: “your sighs . . . your eyes . . . your heart beat.” With its simple repeated words and lush string setting, the song plays more like an incantation than a straight-forward message-bearing device. The whole arrangement slows us down into a place of quiet, which is precisely the point: the things that love wants to say cannot be said, but only looked, breathed, pulsed, felt, for they open out onto an infinite field of desire and blessing. “We could live forever tonight,” Brian Wilson sings in the second verse, but as soon as it is spoken, that possibility sounds absurd. It is only in the shared silence of touch that spirit speaks to spirit, deep unto deep, and the one eternal word echoes through finite being. “Don’t talk. Put your head on my shoulder.”
And so, under a real sleeper of an album title, Pet Sounds opens up for us a world within a world. After the last track fades, a few dogs bark in the distance and a dopplering train passes our ears down the tracks: it is the stuff of forlorn, temporal existence. But as this album causes us to remember, over and over again, atemporal longing is also unavoidably a part of temporal existence. The one word is always struggling against our forgetfulness, to be said once more.
