Kevin Basko on “Pet Sounds”

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.

Good music makes me laugh—whether out of jealousy, absurdity, or sheer amazement—and when I first heard Pet Sounds in high school, I laughed a lot. I remember listening to the first eleven songs and then eventually getting to the penultimate song on the album. Seeing that “Pet Sounds” was the title track, I assumed it would have something special to say, and at the time I was a little underwhelmed that it was just an instrumental, feeling as if it was almost a throwaway soundscape. I was surprised that a group known for their vocals chose not to sing on a song that shared the title for one of their most ambitious albums ever. It would take almost a decade for me to appreciate not just the full weight of the album, but the importance of this song and its placement, where it was situated in what today I think of as an incredible track flow. 

Nowadays, track order is, for me, one of the most important parts of making albums. It’s where you put all the colors on the board and see how they look together. Stories in music are told to their fullest not in a playlist, but in a full thrifty-five-plus minutes—a half-hour where you sit with just one artist and hear them out. Loving music is loving the album, and if you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you love Pet Sounds as much as me. Maybe you’ve even thought about the title track being so near the end, at a point which, some would say, hides the song away—making it not strong enough to be a true finale, not even strong enough to open a beginning or an end of a side of vinyl.

I disagree. For me, the placement of “Pet Sounds” is perfect. By this time in the album—thirty minutes and forty-four seconds into a nearly thirty-six-minute-long record—so much has been said. The lyrics have broken your heart (“I feel so broke, I wanna go home”), mended it (“I know there’s an answer… but I have to find it by myself”), and then broken it again (“I guess I just wasn’t made for these times”). At this point on the emotional trail, we need a lollipop. We need a smile. 

Imagine the album opened with “Pet Sounds” instead of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Not only would it not begin the record with the infectious bang that it does, but it would rob us of a reflective moment between two of the heaviest songs on the album, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” and “Caroline, No.” We need a moment to catch our breath before the final track brings us home. The track flow of Pet Sounds means that “Pet Sounds” the song gives us, with its lack of lyrics, a moment to feel the music alone, just as its brisker tempo helps us not get too down in the dumps. 

Brian’s lyrics from this era are famously complex yet simple, beautiful but dark and funny all at once. By the time “Pet Sounds” arrives, it’s a welcome respite from the mind of someone who’s got a lot going on, like taking a rest on a busy highway. It makes us feel safe in Wilson’s hands, and to me, that’s among the highest forms of artistry: when a composer trusts his listeners and trusts that they trust them back. It’s the kind of trust that only comes from people who can disturb and comfort at the same time—David Lynch or Bowie immediately come to my mind. 

I’m not saying “Pet Sounds” is just an after-dinner mint; it’s something so much more. It’s a soundtrack of the Beach Boys’ past as well as a map of what was to come on albums like Surf’s Up, which tread into darker waters. It feels even more fitting that this song was written for a James Bond soundtrack, originally titled “Run James Run.” The music shows Brian’s obsession with compositional inspiration outside of the pop sphere and his desire to pump other genres such as classical, jazz, and exotica through Phil Spector’s Sixties pop lens, which he greatly admired. It doesn’t even have any other Beach Boys performing on the track: it’s just Brian and the fantastic session players at United Western Recorders.

For me, this is one of the true purposes of music, that it can transcend emotions without saying a single word, a universal language. A band or artist’s choice of a title track (if there is one) are the words that signal to the audience all those not necessarily spoken themes, a potential key to interpretation. Someone like Tom Waits has a particular knack for signaling his album’s heart, grit, and weirdness—think Rain Dogs, Swordfishtrombones, Foreign Affairs, Small Change, etc. Pet Sounds’ title track somewhat warps the perception of a title track being the sum of an album’s parts, given that the Beach Boys use it to mark a feeling instead of a message. It’s almost a power move, to play with the audience’s expectation of a big single—like the Beatles’ “Help!” on Help!, released the year before. 

For most of the records of the Fifties and Sixties, if an album title isn’t a play on the artist’s name like Something Else by the Kinks, A Date With Elvis, or The Beach Boys Today!, it is usually based around a hit single. I’m sure you have your own example in your head of an album title with a huge single sharing the same name. I can’t say enough about how striking and, frankly, weird it is for the Beach Boys to choose a brief, exotica-styled instrumental as their magnum opus’ title track, and it shows the artistic control and confidence they had in their work that they didn’t name the record “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”—that confidence paving the way for artists to push creative boundaries with album themes and titles, not to mention textures and sounds.  

There are many rumors as to why the song is titled “Pet Sounds,” which also speaks to how the album was made. Some say Brian used the word “Pet” to describe his favorite things, that this is a record using his favorite sounds and music ideas. Some say the initials “P.S.” is in quiet homage to Spector and his wall of sound. Some say Mike Love claimed that only dogs could hear what Brian was doing. To be honest, I don’t really care. I care about feeling, and the feeling I get when I hear “Pet Sounds” is one of comfort and warmth. It’s a soft, gentle hand on the back saying that everything’s alright, that you can look ahead. True comfort is about timing, and the song’s value is precisely where it is on the album, giving it its purpose in the collection. “Pet Sounds” reminds me to take a breath amongst the highs and lows of life. You can feel the breeze with the Leslie-fied guitar, the drenched percussion, and the heavy exotica moments that Brian is pulling from. No matter what language you speak, this song can skip past the need for words. Instrumentation alone paints the frame for one of the most vibrant albums ever made.

Postscript: Listen to the album in mono and hear how things melt together in new ways and combinations. Audio engineers used to say mono is 1+1=3. I’ll let you figure out what that means! Seeya. 

Home-recording producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Rubber Band Gun (Kevin Basko) crafts concept rock records from his studio ‘Historic New Jersey’ out of Philadelphia. With over 70+ RBG releases, Basko has proved to be a prolific face of both the pop familiar and the weird within the indie rock world.

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