The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds entry

Pet Sounds is the 11th addition to the famous pop band's arsenal of albums. This album has been hailed as one of the most influential records ever released in pop music. Before The release of Pet Sounds the Beach Boys were known for their songs about cars, surfing, and romance. This is what got them popular and made them the most money at first. They have had many top hits prior to pet sounds with songs like "I Get Around" and "Surfin'." The songs that made them popular in the first place are about very superficial things in life and this is what makes pet sounds so special. It was their first move to writing more introspective songs with deeper meanings. Pet sounds was produced solely by Brian Wilson. Pet Sounds was basically Brian Wilsons baby. He wrote most of the music on this album and sang on many of the tracks. He implemented his own version of the wall of sound and used many different instruments and recording techniques such as recording the instrumental backing tracks for each song as a live ensemble performance direct onto a 4-track recorder. Wilson also used combinations of sounds that of multiple electric instruments and voices in an ensemble and combined them with echo and reverb to get unique sounds. One of the main influences to writing this album was The Beatles' Rubber Soul. Brian Wilson has many other influences as well such as Phil Specter himself,  The Four Freshman, and Chuck Berry. Some characteristics of Pet Sounds that stood out to me were the use of different recording techniques, the many different instruments used like the the theremin, and the use of introspective writing. I enjoyed the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and i think that it is one of the most innovative and influential pop albums of all time. Before this class I had not listened to this album but now I know how influential it really was and how it pushed the beach boys into a new era.