The Beach Boys
What started as a California surf-pop band became, under Brian Wilson's increasingly obsessive studio direction, one of the most ambitious pop projects ever attempted. Pet Sounds turned three-minute songs into miniature symphonies of layered harmony and strange, beautiful instrumentation, chasing a sound in Wilson's head that nobody had ever quite made before. The result reshaped what a pop record was allowed to sound like.
Brian Wilson sat in on Spector's early-1960s sessions and openly modeled his own production ambitions on the Wall of Sound — that dense, cavernous, larger-than-life layering became the whole starting point for Pet Sounds.
listen forPlay Be My Baby and feel how huge and enveloping that Wall of Sound production is, then put on Good Vibrations — Wilson is chasing that same overwhelming scale, just with even stranger instruments.