Ink Tea Stone Leaf

There’s no accounting for taste, they say. There is accounting for sales and streams and concert attendance and chart position and licensing and endorsements, and you can look a lot of those numbers up on the internet, or in a magazine if they still make those. You just can’t account for why two people can hear the same sounds in the same room at the same time, and come away with incompatible ideas about what they mean or what they’re worth.

That’s a curious thing, as music is thoroughly mathematical. The development of high quality digital audio recording is a testament to the fact that everything the human ear can typically discern in music can be expressed as a series of intervals in time and in vibrational frequencies, which can in turn be transcribed into binary code, and thus reproduced ad infinitum with exact precision. The only thing that can’t be numerically duplicated is the listener, each of whom brings an arbitrary rubric to their evaluations. With enough listeners a consensus may be reached, but there’s no guarantee of that.

So when I say that something is amazing, or transcendent, or even simply beautiful, you may be sure that this proves nothing except my own idiosyncrasies. You do not have to accept them as true. You do not have to listen to a word that I say. You can even turn off your computer, if you still have one of those.

As everybody knows, when I was seventeen years old I was enthralled by Pet Sounds, the amazing 1966 album by the Beach Boys. Its transcendent studio craft and beautiful arrangements lastingly reordered my thinking about what it was that made musical works of greater or lesser stature. My discovery of what was then a thirty eight-year-old record also corresponded with a period of significant reappraisal. Pet Sounds, which had been regarded as a commercial disappointment in its own time and been allowed to go out of print after only a few years, was being elevated in the 1990s and 2000s by critics, musicians, and buyers. It swiftly reached gold and then platinum certification after three decades of near obscurity, and was the subject of documentaries, a deluxe box set, and a highly regarded solo tour by composer and Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson. To this day, if you go to a record store (assuming they still have those) and they have any Beach Boys records for sale, one of them will definitely be Pet Sounds.

Amidst all this attention, there was no shortage of material explicating the album’s aesthetic and historical significance for me to read as I studied and enjoyed its intricacies. What I did find to be in short supply were fellow fans in real life. No matter who I talked to, I was usually the only one who had even heard of Pet Sounds, and I often encountered resistance to the idea that there was anything particularly special about it. They just weren’t hearing what I was hearing (and clearly not reading the same magazines and websites).

I particularly remember driving in the car with somebody while playing the album, and the song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” was on. After the first chorus, my companion said something to the effect of “this is the greatest album of all time, really?”

Incidentally, the lead vocal part of the chorus consists of these words:

Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.

The lyricism, right? It’s the lyricism.

The thing is that this is actually an excellent chorus, which is perhaps not well served by writing out the lead vocal without additional musical context; we’ll get back to that in a bit. You just can’t get the sound from the page or the screen. In fact, it is trivially easy to isolate any part of a masterpiece (even the really good parts), put on a mocking voice, and make it sound ridiculous. Everything’s mockable if you’re in a mocking mood.

To really get on board with Pet Sounds as an album that is not only classic but vital requires a mindset that not everybody shares, and it goes beyond just liking the Beach Boys. If you’re not sensitive to older or unfamiliar works; if you’re put off by music that is “soft” and emotionally vulnerable; if you have philosophical qualms about its extensive studio production; if you have little interest in the formal qualities of rhythm, melody, or harmony, and little interest in technical innovations that have since become commonplace; or if your general criteria for good music puts more emphasis on Pet Sounds’ relative weaknesses than its strengths, it would perhaps be surprising if it moved you deep in your heart.

Then again, you may be primed to love an album just like Pet Sounds, but find the album itself leaves you cold. Perhaps you need a story to hook you into loving something like this, and you either don’t know the story or you don’t find it compelling. Maybe you hate the cover art. There could be any number of reasons you can’t appreciate Pet Sounds as its biggest fans do. That’s probably OK: in the end we only hear what we’re ready to hear.

All of this is prologue to what I really want to talk about: all of the reasons I particularly love “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” I heard it recently and wanted to tell everybody all about it, and that’s really all there is to this little excursion. It’s a wonderful song that speaks to whatever my soul is, and I think if you listened closely it would speak to yours too, but since I don’t know your life you’ll just have to find out for yourself.

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Let’s start with that chorus. As previously mentioned, lead singer Brian Wilson repeatedly chants the “sometimes I feel very sad” line, with no variation across most of this part of the song. This is only a small piece of what is going on, however, in a very sophisticated section of this music. In addition to the instrumental backing track, Wilson also overdubs two vocal lines with very different melodies. In one of these, he sings “ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into,” while in the other, he sings “people I know don’t wanna be where I’m at.”

Meanwhile, another overdub brings in a lush five part harmony part, performed by Wilson and the other Beach Boys. Together they sing, somewhat surprisingly, in Spanish: “¿Cuándo seré? Un día seré,” which is in English “when will I be? one day I will be.” All of these parts sung together amount to the equivalent of eight different voices singing four distinct melodies, sharing perfectly coordinated and complementary insights into the meaning of the final line, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.”

An important thing to remember about Wilson’s philosophy as both composer and arranger is that “backing vocals” are not, for him, mere adornments for the lead. Indeed, though I have been calling the “sometimes I feel very sad” chant the lead vocal in the chorus, it may be better to think of the entire section as a composite of different melodies, none of which have any particular claim to lead; the chant is just more prominent in the mix, providing a rhythmic foundation for the other parts to anchor themselves to. In order to appreciate the beauty and feeling in this chorus, you need to listen to all of it all together.

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As a singer, Brian Wilson is probably best known for the ability he had in his youth to sing exceptionally high tenor and falsetto notes. As the Beach Boys defined their musical identity prior to Pet Sounds, Wilson typically placed his voice at the top of multi-part harmonies, or in contrasting co-leads with the lower voice of Mike Love, as on the song “That’s Not Me.” On songs where he was the principle lead singer, it was rare to find Wilson not reaching for very high notes at least part of the time.

The falsetto remains prominent on all the songs of Pet Sounds, but in performing the verses of “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” he actually spends considerably more time in the lower part of his range. He noticeably ascends on lines like “they say I’ve got brains, but they ain’t doing me no good,” but does not really approach the heights of pitch that he reaches on other ballads like “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder).”

There are lots of things to like about this choice; it certainly makes the song easier to sing along to, if you should feel the urge. What I find is that the approach makes Wilson more open and vulnerable in his performance. While he occasionally expressed insecurities about his reliance on falsetto vocals (having once complained that he sounded “like a girl” on the song “Let Him Run Wild”) Wilson clearly enjoyed writing for himself in that range, and it was suitable for his role as leader.

Singing lower on this and some of the other tracks from the album feels like a way to say, “this is my real voice, and this is how I really feel.” It’s consonant with the theme of the song, as well as all the emotional themes of all of Pet Sounds, and Wilson’s ambition as a music maker who had grown beyond what he had previously created within the Beach Boys.

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If this album had not been called Pet Sounds, and if it were not always predestined to be the title of a Brian Wilson solo album in the 90s, then “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” would have been the most suitable title song, as it neatly expresses in music and words all of the feelings conjured by the whole. Like most of the other songs, its lyrics were written by Tony Asher, whose usual gig until then had been writing advertising copy and jingles. Unlike the increasingly abstract and self-consciously poetic lyrics that were coming into fashion, the words on Pet Sounds have a very direct communicative quality. There is some wordplay and a few lovely turns of phrase, but all of it is employed in service of clarity: the words mean what they say, and the tone is honest and confessional.

Another characteristic of Asher’s words is that they are grounded in the colloquial language of their time. I’ve already quoted some of my favorite lines from this song; other lines like “Where can I turn when my fair weather friends cop out? / What’s it all about?” place the song comfortably in the mid-20th century vernacular without coming across as overly dated.

Could another lyricist have added an artfulness that was missing? Possibly, but Asher found real success in writing words that did not distract from Wilson’s musicality, and that seemed to translate Wilson’s intentions perfectly. Of course, Wilson wrote many great songs with collaborators other than Asher; his next major co-writer, Van Dyke Parks, would fully embrace psychedelic symbolism and abstraction. Asher’s approach to writing this song, however, was without fault. Wilson’s isolation, aspiration, and yes, his sadness, never found a more satisfying expression in words.

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Pet Sounds is a very sonically unified album, with each song exhibiting a characteristic sound that is distinct from the work of the Beach Boys either before or after. Part of this comes down to the quality of the session musicians that Wilson hired to record the backing tracks, the notorious Wrecking Crew. Also important was his approach to the studio technology of the time, employing effects and instrument combinations in such a way that left a unique acoustic fingerprint. His idiosyncratic approach to arranging the performances, however, meant that they were all distinguishable by unique instrumental parts: the accordion of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and the french horn of “God Only Knows” illustrate this well.

“I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” employs many staples of the Pet Sounds arrangements, such as a bass guitar playing a melodic line in its upper register, a modified piano and harpsichord combo, various woodwinds, drums and timpani, and guitars with non-standard tuning. Two instrumental parts stand out as particularly characteristic of this song; the first is a recurrent hollow percussive pattern, played on echoing Chinese wooden temple blocks, and the second is the electro-theremin which plays a reprise of the verse melody following the second chorus, just before the coda.

The use of the electro-theremin here, in particular, often draws attention as a precursor to future appearances in pop music, especially the Beach Boys’ own “Good Vibrations.” To my ears, its use in “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” is musically more satisfying, as it feels more integrated with the rest of the instruments and less like a “hook.” Although it is the most exotic instrument on the entire album and appears only once, it does not feel at all out of place, but rather elevates the whole arrangement.

If I am being honest though, my favorite instrument on this song is probably the temple blocks, which clip-clop their way through the music and add just the right amount of levity to balance what might otherwise have been a very depressing piece.

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Listening closely to any of these songs will ultimately lead you to discover subtle interactions and harmonies between instruments and voices that usually pass unnoticed on the first listen. This probably gets at the root of a lot of hesitation among newcomers to Pet Sounds: while it offers many simple pleasures, getting at the heart of it requires work on the listener’s part. Even without reinventing musical theory or masking its meaning behind obscure poetry, it is still a challenging record.

To understand “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” however, is to understand the whole album, as its virtues are the same. Its synthesis of the simple with the complex is the mark of its sophistication, and the spirit of its creator. As hard as it may be to grasp all at once, it cries out to be understood, and appreciated by all who can relate to the feelings that inspired it.