Derrick Rossignol on “Let’s Go Away for Awhile”

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.

Here’s an Eighties and Nineties television trivia fact: the popular family sitcom Full House sometimes featured guest appearances from a group called the Beach Boys, but did you know they were actually a band in real life, outside of the show? It turns out they were pretty good, too!

Jokes aside, the hits are legendary: “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Good Vibrations”, “I Get Around,” “California Girls,” and “Help Me, Rhonda” are a few of note. Those songs all have a couple of things in common. One is that Brian Wilson co-wrote them. Clearly, he was pretty good at writing songs. That doesn’t mean it was always an easy process for him. The biggest example of that is SMiLE, an album that the Beach Boys intended to release in the late 1960s. For several reasons, with creative differences within the band and Wilson facing mental health issues being among the most-cited, the project went unfinished for years, until Wilson revisited it on his 2004 solo album, Brian Wilson Presents Smile.

The other shared attribute of those aforementioned songs is that they were all released before Pet Sounds, one of the most artistically respected works in music history. Writing the album, Wilson largely collaborated with lyricist Tony Asher. The tracklist also gives songwriting credits to the band’s Mike Love (though Love had to sue Wilson to get that recognition) and their road manager, Terry Sachen. There are two songs that Wilson wrote himself: the album’s two instrumentals (which Billboard, in a belated 1968 review of the album, called “superb“).

One is the title track, “Pet Sounds.” The song had an exotic, Latin-inspired sound and was initially intended to be a theme song for a James Bond movie (Surfin’ UK, perhaps? Help Me, Pussy Galore?). Wilson later explained, “We were gonna try to get it to the James Bond people. But we thought it would never happen, so we put it on the album.” The second was “Let’s Go Away for Awhile,” which Wilson thought highly of. In a 1966 interview, he proudly declared: “I think that on Pet Sounds, the track ‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’ is the finest piece of art I’ve ever made. Does that sound like I’m bigtiming? It isn’t meant to. I just believe it. It all worked perfectly.” He still felt that way in 1967, calling the song “the most satisfying piece of music I have ever made.”

Perhaps part of the reason Wilson loved the track so much was that it wasn’t easy to get it over the finish line. It was satisfying to shape it into what it became. As further evidence that songwriting isn’t always easy, this track underwent many significant changes before reaching its final form. In one of its earliest iterations, “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” had the placeholder name “Untitled Ballad” before being re-titled to “The Old Man And The Baby.” At another juncture, it was supposedly called “Let’s Go Away for Awhile (And Then We’ll Have World Peace).” Asher once said that the title was inspired by Del Close and John Brent’s 1961 comedy album How to Speak Hip, a parody of language instruction albums: “I played it for Brian, and it destroyed him, killed him. Brian picked up a couple of references on the album. One of them was this hip character that said if everyone were ‘laid back and cool, then we’d have world peace.’ So Brian started going around saying, ‘Hey, would somebody get me a candy bar, and then we’ll have world peace.'”

While “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” ended up as an instrumental, that wasn’t always the intention. Wilson himself said, “The track was supposed to be the backing for a vocal, but I decided to leave it alone. It stands up well alone.” It was later revealed that a session was even scheduled for recording vocals, but Capitol, the band’s record label, apparently insisted on using that time to mix the album instead. Asher, though, has said that no lyrics for the song were actually ever written.

At one point, the song could have been titled “The Old Man And The Baby.” Instead, it ended up as an instrumental dubbed “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.” The chill, lounge-y song runs for under two-and-a-half minutes but effortlessly glides through numerous sections and moods during its lush, string-laden runtime. Wilson has said the song was inspired by Burt Bacharach, the legendary songwriter behind songs like B.J. Thomas’ “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By.” It’s easy to hear the influence, which he’d later revisit on Friends in 1968.

Wilson was clearly happy with how the song worked out, even if the part about him being denied the chance to record vocals like he wanted is true. It’s a song he remained proud of in the decades following Pet Sounds, too. He later said of it, “‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’ was probably my favorite, one of my favorite, instrumentals we ever did. It didn’t have any vocal or voice parts to it, but it was just an experience in instrumental music. It had an interesting piano sound and the bass line was very uplifting and lilting and creative and stuff like that. ‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’ was an attempt to make a more pleasant, easygoing, ‘take your mind away’ kind of thing.” He added, “Going into things like guitars going [imitates guitar sound], like experiencing an orgasm, you know, musical orgasm.” Maybe that’s why the band didn’t play this one for the Tanner family on Full House.

Come back tomorrow to read about “God Only Knows.”

Derrick Rossignol is a writer and editor whose work covering music, video games, and other areas of pop culture has appeared in publications like The A.V. Club, The Boston Globe, CBR, The Guardian, Nintendo Life, and Uproxx.

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