FIFTY YEARS is a long time, particularly in the quick-change world of pop songs. So it’s kind of amazing that Brian Wilson, architect of the Beach Boys’ sound, is celebrating a half-century of his group’s masterpiece, the Pet Sounds album, with a tour that recreates its intricately layered arrangements and amber-tinted, halcyon songs. “I wanted to make an album that would stand up in 10 years,” Wilson once said. That his creation has lasted five times that long, and accumulates greater esteem with each passing year, would surely have surprised the gentle songwriter upon its groundbreaking release in 1966.
Even then, Pet Sounds was a look backward—to teen innocence, to puppy love, to a time before grown-up responsibilities take hold—and the album’s dramatic tension comes from those themes of idealism colliding with the everyday problems of adulthood and the modern world. Wilson’s difficult childhood, along with the pressure of the Beach Boys’ success and the internal conflicts the band was experiencing at the time, provoked him to weave the pocket symphonies of Pet Sounds into safety blankets, shielding him from the outside world in a cocoon of warm, ecstatic sound. And for the 36 minutes of Pet Sounds' duration, listeners can wrap Wilson’s cocoon around themselves, too.