Released: 1966
Sometimes your eyes and ears can be deceived. Over the course of time it’s become if not fashionable then accepted to offer up God Only Knows as The Beach Boys finest song, with the binding onward definition that it would therefore be one of the greatest ever written.
That this always occurs at the expense of Good Vibrations is by extension forgotten, because the sheer ridiculousness of the idea, that Brian Wilson’s avant pop overture could somehow be bettered – even by himself – fails to survive a cursory sniff test. You can think it’s true, or a plausible hypothesis, but you’d be wrong by any measure that can be dreamed up.
Now that’s agreed we can dwell with criminal briefness on the song itself, one Wilson told Uncut in 2007 that the group remit for equalled nothing less than teleportation. ‘We all wanted to do something different, make some music that would last forever,’ he said, describing the collective legacy they wanted as ‘Not just surf songs and car songs.’
Wilson had slipped the chains of tweedom via LSD and pot, drugs good for creativity – but not productivity. First conceived in 1965 during the Pet Sounds sessions, after lyricist Mike Love took five minutes to write the words, the famously drawn-out recording process spanned five studios, 17 dates and resulted in 90,000 hours of tape.
The results however were extraordinary. Love fretted that the use of a theremin would alienate fans who had bought into the band’s to that point very straight dynamic, but as complicated as it had been to assemble, this beautiful psychedelic Frankenstein refracted their new aura equally through sun and sky.
It remains pristine, not something to put inside a glass display case less it dissolves with age, but just as vibrant, immediate, plain crazy and wonderful as the first time you ever heard it. God Only Knows? It’s a great song. But it’s not this one. Your ears will never stop deserving it.
The Voice Of Unreason 
A true masterpiece!
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