God Only Knows
"God Only Knows" is a song by the American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1966 album Pet Sounds. Written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, it is a baroque-style love song distinguished for its harmonic innovation and complexity, unusual instrumentation, and subversion of typical popular music conventions, both lyrically and musically. It is often praised as one of the greatest songs of all time and as the Beach Boys' finest record.
The song's musical sophistication is demonstrated by its three contrapuntal vocal parts and weak tonal center. Lyrically, the words are expressed from the perspective of a narrator who asserts that life without their lover could only be fathomed by God—an entity that had been considered taboo to name in the title or lyric of a pop song. It marked a departure for Wilson, who attributed the impetus for the song to Asher's affinity for standards such as "Stella by Starlight". Some commentators interpret "God Only Knows" as promoting suicidal ideations, although such an interpretation was not intended by the songwriters. Others have compared the song's advanced harmonic structure to the work of classical composers such as Delibes, Bach, and Stravinsky.
Wilson produced the record between March and April 1966, enlisting about 20 session musicians who variously played drums, sleigh bells, plastic orange juice cups, clarinets, flutes, strings, French horn, accordion, guitars, upright bass, harpsichord, and a tack piano with its strings taped. His brother Carl Wilson sang lead, a vocal performance that became regarded as Carl's best ever, with Brian himself and Bruce Johnston providing additional harmonies. The song ends with a series of repeating vocal rounds, another device that was uncommon for popular music of the era.
"God Only Knows" was issued as the B-side of "Wouldn't It Be Nice" in July 1966 and peaked at number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. In other countries, it was the single's A-side, reaching the top 10 in the UK, Canada, Norway, and the Netherlands. Many songwriters, including Paul McCartney and Jimmy Webb, have cited "God Only Knows" as their favorite song of all time. In 2004, it was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll". In 2021, it was ranked number 11 in Rolling Stones list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
Inspiration
"God Only Knows" is among the several songs that Brian Wilson and Tony Asher wrote for the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album. Asher felt that it was the pair's most effortless collaboration, remembering that Wilson "spent more time tweaking the instrumental part than we did writing the words!" Recalling "God Only Knows", Wilson acknowledged that he himself had "not written that kind of song" before and explained, "I think Tony had a musical influence on me somehow. After about ten years, I started thinking about it deeper ... And I remember him talking about 'Stella by Starlight' and he had a certain love for classic songs." Asher concurred that he felt he had inspired Wilson to write the song.File:Lovin Spoonful 1965.jpg|thumb|upright|The Lovin' Spoonful's 1965 hit "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice" was a possible influence on the song.
Wilson's 1991 memoir states that the melody for "God Only Knows" was derived from "a John Sebastian song I had been listening to". When presented with this information, Asher and Sebastian said they were unaware of such a connection. Biographer Mark Dillon suggested that Wilson's inspiration would likely have been the vocal layering on "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice", a recent hit by Sebastian's band the Lovin' Spoonful. In later interviews, Wilson said that he wrote "God Only Knows" as an attempt to match the standard of the Beatles' album Rubber Soul. In his recollection, he was under the influence of marijuana and was "so blown away" with the album that he sat at his piano and began writing the song.
Asked about Pet Sounds in various interviews, Wilson frequently emphasized the album's spiritual qualities, saying that he had held prayer sessions with his brother Carl and "kind of made a religious ceremony." At the time of the song's writing, he was married to singer Marilyn Rovell. Writing in his book about the album, Jim Fusilli noted a closing phrase Wilson had once written to his wife in 1964: "Yours 'til God wants us apart." In a 1976 radio interview, Wilson said that the song was not written for anyone in particular. Marilyn, who felt that much of the lyrical content on Pet Sounds was aimed at her, commented of the song, "I'm the only one here, so it must be about me. Then I would think, 'No it wasn't.
Lyrics
At the time the song was written, referencing "God" in a title or lyric was generally considered a taboo for pop music, and there had been at least one recent instance of a record being banned from radio for having words such as "hell" or "damn". Asher said that he and Wilson had "lengthy conversations" about the lyric, "because unless you were Kate Smith and you were singing 'God Bless America', no one thought you could say 'God' in a song.... He said, 'We'll just never get any air play. He believed that Wilson agreed to the title after being told by other people that it was "an opportunity to be really far out it would cause some controversy, which he didn't mind." Dillon wrote that referring to God may have also been viewed as "a square move" due to the nascent decline of traditional religion in the United States.In the lyrics, the narrator anticipates the dissolution of their romantic relationship, and asserts that life without their lover could only be fathomed by God. The deceptive opening line, "I may not always love you", was the subject of another argument between the songwriters. According to Asher, "I liked that twist, and fought to start the song that way. Working with Brian, I didn't have a whole lot of fighting to do, but I was certainly willing to fight for the end for that." In the next line, the narrator reassures that they will be with their lover "so long as there are stars above you". Marilyn interpreted the opening lines as autobiographical from Wilson's point of view: "he knew that I was there and I would never leave him, so he knew that he could abuse me, even though he didn't try to. I was never number one, I was always two or three. But if I would leave in some kind of a way, he would get totally distraught."
Of the songs on Pet Sounds, "God Only Knows" is the most lyrically ambiguous. Commentators have sometimes attributed a suicidal quality to the protagonist. In the second verse, the narrator declares that "life would go on... should you ever leave me", but if that outcome were to occur, then "what good would living do me?" The suggested implication is that they would end their life without their lover—an interpretation that Asher said was not intended by himself or Wilson. Among other interpretations, writer James Perone, who referred to the song as "one of the more unusual expressions of love in a 1960s' pop song", believed that there is "a hint that part of 'love' may be self-serving and part of a cycle of codependency." Cash Box described the song as a "slow-shufflin' tender, romantic ode about a guy who is so much in love that he doesn't think that he could go on without his gal."
Asher stated that the intended expression of the song's lyrics was I'll love you the sun burns out, then I'm gone,' ergo 'I'm gonna love you forever. Wilson commented that the song was based around "being blind but in being blind, you can see more. You close your eyes; you're able to see a place or something that's happening."
Composition
Key ambiguity and motifs
"God Only Knows" contains a weak tonal center that is closest to E major and, in other sections, A major. Adding to this, almost all of the chords are inverted. An E major triad with its bass note in the root position is never invoked, and instead, the position is favored. Of the tracks on Pet Sounds, it is the only one that lacks a strongly established primary key center, and the only one that modulates its key up a fourth interval.In his book about Pet Sounds, Charles Granata writes that some of the musical devices that "God Only Knows" employs are usually "rather ordinary" by themselves. However, in this case, they were executed in a manner that was "far more sophisticated than anything the Beach Boys—or any other modern pop vocal group—had done before." According to musicologist James Garratt, the "tonal plasticity" made the song innovative not just in pop music, but also for the Baroque style it is emulating. He credits the sense of "expansiveness" evoked by the piece to this quality, emphasized by the disuse of authentic cadences and root-position tonics. Lambert states that "a clear sense of key" eludes the listener "for the entire experience—that in fact, the idea of 'key' has itself been challenged and subverted".
The song contains a recurring melodic motif that is reinforced by the lead vocal and the line played on French horn. Musician Andy Gill identified the verse and chorus melodies as variations on the same line, and added that this type of melodic variation was "very" similar to the technique as it is used in classical pieces such as Delibes' Lakmé. To Lambert, the song's use of vocal counterpoints evoked the sacred traditions of a cantata by Bach or an oratorio by Handel. He likened the use of sustained strings to those employed by Wilson on the Pet Sounds tracks "Don't Talk " and "I'm Waiting for the Day".
While some commentators have characterized Pet Sounds as a baroque pop album, musicologist John Howland argues that "God Only Knows" is the album's only track that can be described as such. "Baroque pop" was not used in reviews or critical discussions on Pet Sounds until rock critics in the 1990s began adopting the phrase in reference to artists that the album had influenced. Howland commented that some "classicistic gestures" are present in the orchestration for "God Only Knows", however, listeners must keep in mind that "orchestral instruments do not always signify baroque/classicistic textures".