Matt Mitchell on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”

The Pet Sounds Project is Paste’s two-week celebration of the Beach Boys’ eleventh album, which turns sixty years old on May 16, 2026.

Few songs change my stars each time I hear them, but “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is one. If I’m listening alone, I probably look like Adam Sandler in that one 50 First Dates scene. That rhythm, powered by two accordions, is like the Taj Mahal. Maybe it’s Barney Kessel’s twelve-string mando-guitar locking in with Hal Blaine’s “bum, two-three-four, bum-dum” drumbeat for a key change. Maybe it’s Brian Wilson asking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong?” Or maybe it’s what the song makes possible: Sol carrying that question and their keyboard a thousand miles east to play Brian’s melody while my best friend Jessi reaches Brent at the altar, her eggshell-white dress train halving the room. Like Pet Sounds, everything deserves a perfect beginning. 

Brian, then twenty-three years old, began recording “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with Phil Spector’s house band at Gold Star Studios on January 22, 1966. Similar to “You Still Believe in Me,” Brian made Tony Asher wait to write lyrics until the melody was finished. When it was, he gave Asher a prompt: “the innocence of being too young to get married.” But if you want the song’s specific—albeit discredited–inspiration: Brian’s infatuation with Diane Rovell, his sister-in-law and Honeys singer. When Asher started brainstorming the lyrics, Brian microanalyzed individual words until, in a burst of annoyance, Asher convinced the Beach Boy to let him work on the song alone at home. Upon his return to the studio, he and Brian retooled the lyrics themselves, though a 1994 lawsuit tacked on a songwriting attribution for Mike Love: the “good night, my baby / sleep tight, my baby” outro, supposedly suggested over the phone. 

Los Angeles felt like two cities then. The previous August, the Watts Riots tore through the south side: thirty-four dead, three thousand arrested, a thousand injured, $40 million in property damage. That same autumn, the Dodgers beat the Minnesota Twins in the World Series after Sandy Koufax threw a three-hit shutout in game seven. In the aftermath of Malcolm X’s murder, Bloody Sunday in Selma, and Vietnam War escalations, whatever remained of the Sixties’ innocence vanished. On Santa Monica Boulevard, the false optimism of an adolescent rock love song—and its chorus of timpani, accordion, saxophone, and glockenspiel—swirled in the echo of Gold Star’s orchestra room while Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, Love, and Brian’s brothers Carl and Dennis were on tour in Japan. 

The harmonies—duplicated vocal counterpoints stacked like an orchestra while the band stays within the same octave: Mike singing the bottom, Carl above that, Al’s bright timbre joined with Brian at the top—were painstakingly tracked for a month at Columbia upon the band’s return from Japan. On “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” they are, as Nick Kent succinctly wrote, “so complex they seemed to have more in common with a Catholic Mass than any cocktail lounge a cappella doo-wop.” 

“Genius” seems like an outlandish thing to call anybody, even the person who wrote out the most incoherent charts for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” yet somehow coached the session players to interpret them. On the phone last week, Al Jardine told me that he and Pet Sounds bassist Carol Kaye still joke with each other about how impossible Brian’s sheet music was to read. But “genius” is too academic a label for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” The song bypasses intellect and ends up holy or alien, even in mono. To make something like it, you don’t need to be God, but you do need to have Him on speed dial.

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” eclipsed the sentiments of Brian’s earlier heavy-hearted fictions, like “We’ll Run Away” and “Don’t Worry, Baby.” Rather than write another teen-angst soap opera about hot rods, bikini babes, and the southwest L.A. suburbs, Brian began his magnum opus with a pocket symphony about monogamy and marital bliss. The song overcomes the Beach Boys’ most clichéd, materialistic ideas. Though my job requires it, I don’t always morally agree with the institution of ranking music, because defining “greatness” across a span that includes Beethoven and Brian Wilson is complicated, if not totally senseless. But Pet Sounds makes it less so by demonstrating an emotional intelligence—anger, hope, dissonance, love—that seems both lived-in and larger than us. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is youthful art unbuttoned from youth itself. It’s Symphony No. 9 for the Age of Aquarius, a revved-up soul in the pitch dark. 

PET SOUNDS GOES TO A PLACE that still feels unreachable. And yet, the album begins with two of the most achievable goals there are: finding love and getting older. I have, like many of the narrators in Brian’s pre-Pet Sounds material, tried and failed at a lot of loves. In fact, I was raised by two people with an imperfect one. But, to me, the couple in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is like Jessi and Brent, who I’m sure will celebrate their anniversaries on the moon. A steel-pan builder matching with an accountant on Tinder seemed funny over text, but their needs soon tilted toward each other, and it became a fairytale. Author Michael Chabon said it well: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” marked “the gap between the wish and the world.” Its titular phrase, like the crack of a lightning whip, is so potent it returns in the a cappella fadeout of Pet Sounds closer “Caroline, No.” 

Few people have remained ignorant about Pet Sounds all these years later. You either know it by name or by its most omnipresent portions: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Sloop John B,” “God Only Knows.” None matched the commercial favor of “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” or “Barbara Ann,” but they were Top 40 hits. Still, Pet Sounds didn’t go gold, even when the Beatles were using it as stimulus (barking dogs and all) to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—as grand a rock and roll folktale as any. But Paul McCartney calling “God Only Knows” one of his favorite records wasn’t convincing people to spend $3.98 on a pop band suddenly playing grown-up. Brian Wilson compared his songs to “being blind, but in being blind, you can see more. You close your eyes; you’re able to see a place or something that’s happening,” and only the English bought in. Here in the States, Pet Sounds’ combination of ambition, thematic coherence, and zero surf motifs was, as Mike Love would happily concur, fucking with the Beach Boys’ formula.

When Capitol released Best of the Beach Boys two months later to mitigate losses, Pet Sounds’ place in the wastebin of popular music seemed all but confirmed. The U.S. pressing of the compilation conveniently only featured songs from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) or earlier. Things were so dire for Hawthorne’s favorite sons that you’d be right to assume that every national newspaper ran BEACH BOYS FOUND DEAD on its front page that summer. But then, a recording from the Pet Sounds sessions hit the radio: “Good Vibrations.” It whisked the Beach Boys out of the doldrums in October 1966, splashing their harmonies all over the Billboard charts and confirming them as the Beatles’ true Western counterpart—or foil, depending on allegiance. NME readers named the Beach Boys the world’s top vocal group in 1966. In the sixty years since, millions have built shrines to Pet Sounds and grieved the disappearance of its intended successor, SMiLE—Brian’s teenage symphony to God. If you’re not a die-hard Beach Boys fan, the catalog may end there. I’ll save my Surf’s Up, Holland, and Love You evangelizing for another day because I, too, restart Pet Sounds instead of queuing up Smiley Smile, the SMiLE stand-in that depreciated Brian’s unwieldy ambitions and spiritual interpretations. I return to that epiphanic “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” prosody time and again rather than march onward. 

I’ve only seen the Beach Boys once: eleven years ago, when Mike Love and Bruce Johnston brought their tour to Warren, Ohio’s Packard Music Hall—a mid-sized theater more famous for its high-school graduation ceremonies than concert revues. Love covered Brian’s singing parts and packed the setlist with the formula he didn’t want fucked with. Five seats away from me, a man cried like a baby during “In My Room.” We all sat quietly while the late Carl Wilson’s “God Only Knows” vocal filled the room and a montage of him played behind the band. Octogenarians and college kids alike boogied and bounced out of their chairs for “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” But the two-thousand-person crowd’s loudest applause of the night came when that mando-guitar sound introduced “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” 

I hear the song now and I’m reminded of a Guardian quote said by Brian Wilson’s old songwriting partner, Van Dyke Parks: “You start to see the fundamentals in the sky. And that’s where I am now. I can see the constellations.” Parks was talking about old age there, but these days I follow his siren. If the love in “God Only Knows” is a mystery, then the love in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is naivete or fantasy, depending on your imagination or innocence. When Sol’s keyboard put Brian’s melody in the air all around Jessi and then Brent, every face in that room was smiling. It was the dream of getting older turning into a promise to do it together. I think I’d like to have a love like that. Every time the key change sends “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” soaring upward, I too scale those starry-eyed walls of devotion. 

Come back tomorrow to read about “You Still Believe in Me.”

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.

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