Niko Stratis on “God Only Knows”

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.

If a piece of music can be something more than itself, then imagine “God Only Knows” as a Rorschach test. A swirling and beautiful abyss that, once stared into, conjures reflections of the heart. There are bodies of work that are grand and daunting to discuss, and few hold as much distinction as “God Only Knows,” which has been lauded in all the years since its creation as a masterwork of pop music. There is something about the flowers laid at the feet of greatness, how they arrange themselves as a shield around an idea and make it impenetrable. Pet Sounds is an astounding record created by a mind fighting against itself at every turn, and “God Only Knows” is its center: a haunting and playful song, surreal just as quickly as it is an outlet of desperate beauty. A magnum opus with scars on its facade. 

Which is not to say the song is imperfect, but rather that nothing is perfect, not the least of which a song and an idea and a man who, when in need of a life raft, was given a piano instead. “God Only Knows” is the centrepiece of the grand tableau of Pet Sounds, the moment where the chaos and whimsy give way to desperate yearning and well-wrung emotions. It’s self-serving at times, in others lonely or bargaining for mercy, and perhaps most of all, it is vulnerable despite all its bluster. Brian Wilson was a great many things, and above all the accolades and laudatory phrases, he was a man. Fallible and capable of tremendous genius, who invokes the name of God to remind us of our shared flesh and blood. 

So when I say that “God Only Knows” is an abyss, it is in fact an open idea that will change for each listener. It depends on who you are, and your questions that are seeking answers. Each listen, and each new ear might live in the notes of a different song. Carl Wilson’s voice might find you in new and different places with every repeated playback. How he opens defeated, singing “I may not always love you” before turning to how the universe will have to end before he does. Or maybe Carl’s voice fades into the backdrop, behind the strings and steady piano accented by sleigh bells. Maybe the standout is the wild chorus of “ba-ba-ba”s. It is a recursive journey through questions on love, death, and the end of all things. That it never arrives at an answer is, in fact, the point. We are here to question and wonder. Let our anxious thoughts drive our fingers on the keys of a piano and allow them to wander aloud with all their stark rhythms. 

 Written with Phil Spector’s wall of sound in mind and the unmistakable influence of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul dancing below its loftiest ideals, “God Only Knows” is the nexus point for the shift in Brian Wilson, and, by extension, the Beach Boys. Wilson was only starting to show signs of struggle when he retreated away from public life in the mid-Sixties, turning to the studio as a refuge from a world that grew increasingly hostile to his sensitivities. Where most of Pet Sounds’ beauty is anarchic for its day, its wild sounds and grand ideas challenging the conventions and perceived wholesomeness of Sixties American pop music, “God Only Knows” is something calmer. Serene, almost like a breath at rest that knows the horizon will never look the same and is ready for the unknown. If you have ever lost yourself, and if you have ever needed a way back to shore, may “God Only Knows” be your lighthouse. A path lit by Wilson’s journey through the fog. 

The noise of Brian Wilson’s brain is an undeniable presence on the song, as he has found function and perfect form for all its disparate pieces. As if each emotion and synapse within him was given an instrument as an avatar. There is the accordion, the sleigh bells, the guitars, and the Steinway grand piano with taped strings. There is a violin, and also a viola, and someone playing wax paper cups. All of it is working together to give shape to Wilson’s vision. In covers and subsequent versions of the song, some or all of these elements are missing, and while they are still lush recreations of beauty, they are all trying to take layers and flatten them into a singular vision. Some will tell you that the genius of the song lies in its chords, that its beauty is in all the flats and sharps and major keys, but I am not a musician and this is not for me to say. It’s not for me to understand the how, only to unpack all the what. 

One could argue then that the wax paper cups are the most important instrument on the record. Present only to make a clip-clop rhythm that emerges and retreats almost at random. These are rhythms of anxious ideas that make it all the more beautiful by their outlandish inclusion. Wilson heard them when he imagined the song, and so they had to be there. If you have ever lost your mind, you have surely heard these, too: sounds and things you swear are there, as if they are constants grounding you in place and reminding you that the world is still real, and loud, and present. Without them, the song is just another beautiful song, it’s about love or about God, maybe, or both, and if that is true, it is nothing. 

It’s impossible to say that “God Only Knows” is about something, because it can be about everything. It could be a bargain with the God witnessed from the floor while high on LSD. It could be a ballad written to a lover who is starting to feel the distance grow between lives that once felt so close. It could be the opening lines of a suicide note. It’s a question more than it is an answer, asked by a man who had not yet started to find words for the truths that plagued him. The God in question is less the deity of creation and more a vision witnessed in self-guided madness. It doesn’t even matter who the song is written for; Brian Wilson’s first wife, Marilyn Rovell, thought at times it must be about her, and at others that it couldn’t possibly be about her at all. The subject is less important than what the song is working to decode. 

But this is not to say the journey to creation was made alone, as the song was co-written by Tony Asher, who contributed to many of the songs that would appear on Pet Sounds, serving as an interpreter of Wilson’s vision. Asher and Wilson both have shifting memories of the songwriting, trailing its influence back to singles from the Lovin’ Spoonful, or smoking weed and trying to decode the Beatles’ “The Word.” Regardless, Asher was there to help Wilson’s idea find its true and final form, and when people discuss genius, they sometimes forget to mention those who help enable the word: the collaborators and interpreters of vision, who can help wrangle all the loose threads that float in the air of creation and imagine them sewn together in delicate harmony. 

There is also the weight and impact of the Sixties, of drugs and a shift away from performative niceties. Wilson was smoking weed, same as anyone, but he was also opening himself to the proposed possibility of psychedelics, perhaps because he was looking for answers that were beyond the questions of the day. In a trip, he swears to have seen God, and on Pet Sounds, that God is called out by name, itself a heretical notion at the time. The creation of Pet Sounds was indeed a religious experience, with prayer and devotion the same as any. Wilson was seeking guidance while succumbing to something unknown to him, breakdowns and isolation caused by his yet undiagnosed mental illness, and the pressure of immense stardom. 

The genius of Brian Wilson is undisputed; his worldview was shaped in part by his experience with drugs, and the combined effects of exhaustion, mental illness, and a slight deafness in one ear. This manner of genius, the troubled and tortured kind, is not bestowed upon just anyone; some are geniuses and others are forgotten, and neither is ever fully true. There are some whose names are written on the walls of history, and there are others who are there with an asterisk. In a Vulture piece published last year after the back-to-back deaths of both Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, critic Craig Jenkins wrote, “Brian Wilson got a grace period and was making great music well into the 2010s; Sly Stone tried but never entirely rebounded.” 

Perhaps then the genius of Brian Wilson is not in his otherworldly talents, but rather his flawed humanity. “God Only Knows” is trying to be perfect, just as it’s almost desperate to be anything but. It is a lush and grand announcement of Wilson’s desperate need to feel anything at all, to feel real and human and connected to a world he surely felt increasingly at odds with. It’s strange at times, and at others will make you cry even if you’ve heard it a thousand times before. It will grow as we grow, and mean something new with each new scar upon our own aging facades. Maybe this is what genius is: not a crystalline centre, but a cracked lens into the darkest corners of the world, viewed by a man who can’t help but interpret the signals from an incessantly boisterous imagination as light in contrast. Brian Wilson is a genius because he was just like so many of us—lost, and desperate, and yearning for something; eager to make the noise of himself something perfect and real, so that all of life’s hardships and victories would align and tell stories of the beauty in being so human as to be broken. The rhythm of his heart was made perfect by wax paper cups. 

Come back tomorrow to read about “I Know There’s An Answer.”

Niko Stratis is a former smoker and an award-losing (and winning) writer. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, and the newsletter Anxiety Shark. She once came 2nd in a Chicken McNugget eating competition, but that was a long time ago. She is a cancer, and she lives in Toronto.

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