The Beach Boys

Boys who loved Chuck Berry dressed his rock and roll in the scenery of surfing and Four Freshmen-style harmony; the song carried the band onto the national stage.

• The sharp guitar in the intro is a technique Carl Wilson picked up by imitating Chuck Berry. That sound, struck in clipped single-string lines, is the engine of the whole song.
• The melody comes from Chuck Berry's “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Hear the two side by side and you can tell what was added to the same skeleton, above all how different a color the harmonies laid behind it give.
• Above Mike Love's nasal-tinged lead, Brian's high falsetto floats up in every chorus. Recording the same voice twice and layering the takes (double tracking) thickens the sound.
• A short organ solo and a guitar solo follow one another in the middle, and the song is over in a little over two minutes. It is the compressed form of the radio single, pure and simple.

Born of the very session in which Brian fired his father as manager, the song became the band's first American number one amid the Beatles' onslaught.

• The song opens with harmony that surges in on voices alone, without accompaniment. Listen in the first few seconds to how the five singers' parts stack up.
• In the verses Mike sings low and fast, almost as if talking, while in the chorus Brian's falsetto soars above. The contrast between the roles of the two voices is the core of the band's sound in this period.
• In the instrumental break, a clipped, staccato guitar solo and handclaps come in. You can glimpse the simple accompaniment of surf rock growing more intricate in Brian's hands.
• There are moments when the rhythmic feel shifts abruptly between verse and chorus. Within a little over two minutes, Brian's habit of stitching several scenes together had already begun.

Having left the road and been spurred on by “Rubber Soul,” Brian made an album of love's anxieties and the fear of growing up; it was a link in the chain that led to the Beatles' “Sgt. Pepper's.”

• The intro of the first track, “Wouldn't It Be Nice,” begins with a clear, harp-like arpeggio (a chord played out one note at a time), and a single stroke of Hal Blaine's drum throws the door open. That is why we chose this song for the video card.
• Because Brian was nearly deaf in his right ear, he finished this album as a single stream of sound with no left or right (mono). A stereo version was not made until 1997, so if you can, listen to the mono version first.
• In “I Just Wasn't Made for These Times” you can hear an electronic instrument that produces gliding high notes (the Electro-Theremin). It is counted among the earliest uses of the instrument on a rock record.
• Sounds foreign to rock, such as accordion, harpsichord, flute and bicycle bells, are hidden throughout. At the end of the final track, “Caroline, No,” come the sound of a train and the barking of Brian's dogs, Banana and Louie.

The love song at the very heart of “Pet Sounds,” which Paul McCartney has named more than once as his favorite song.

• French horn and harpsichord open the intro. Chamber-music instrumentation in place of a rock band's guitars shapes the song's first impression.
• Carl Wilson sings lead. Brian recalled that he chose not to sing it himself, feeling that his younger brother's clear, unadorned voice suited the song.
• Critics often point to the way the harmony drifts without making clear which key it rests in. That instability, the sense that even at the end of a verse you have not come home, meshes with the lyric's precarious confession.
• In the final section Brian's and Bruce's voices enter staggered, overlapping like a round. On earphones you can hear more clearly how the three strands of melody interweave.

Pieced together from fragments recorded in several studios over more than half a year, it is the work of Brian's creativity at its peak, just before it collapsed with “Smile.”

• In the verses, beneath Carl's gentle lead, the cellos lay down a triplet rhythm, bowing three quick, clipped notes at a time. It is the moment strings step into the place of a rock accompaniment.
• The high sound that glides up and down in the chorus is the Electro-Theremin played by Paul Tanner. Beneath it, Mike props things up in a low register, marking the beat.
• Midway through, a hushed passage suddenly arrives in which only organ and percussion remain, and then unaccompanied harmonies unfold. These seams, where the mood shifts as if the scene had changed, are the traces of fragment-by-fragment editing.
• The recording was spread across four studios, Gold Star, Western, Sunset Sound and Columbia, each chosen deliberately for the sound of its room. The production cost is said to have run to tens of thousands of dollars, a figure unheard of for a single at the time.

Written with Van Dyke Parks for “Smile” in 1966, the song was brought back to life by Carl five years after the album fell apart.

• In late 1966 Brian was filmed singing this song alone at the piano, and the footage aired on an American television program hosted by Leonard Bernstein. Set beside the 1971 version, it shows how early the song had been finished.
• In the 1971 version, Carl sings the opening, while the middle section splices in Brian's 1966 piano recording as it was. Listen for the point where the voice and the texture of the recording change.
• The lyric is a metaphor that lays a splendid civilization in decline over the innocence of a child, far removed from a straightforward love song. Low-lying brass holds up its desolate mood.
• In the final section, voice upon voice stacks up into a chorus that seems as if it could go on forever. It is the passage where the sound “Smile” dreamed of comes closest.

A song from “Sunflower,” on which Dennis, the band's drummer who had lived in his older brother's shadow, blossomed as a songwriter; Brian is said to have cherished it.

• Dennis sings the lead himself. His voice, rougher and lower than his brothers', gives the song a warm weight instead of taking from it.
• Over a gentle acoustic guitar, his brothers' background harmonies slowly rise. In the way the harmonies wrap around Dennis's voice, you can hear that this band was a family.
• The song is short, just over two and a half minutes. With nothing wasted, it carries a single confession through to the end, in a tender tone that speaks directly to the one it loves.
• At the end, the voices fold over one another in many layers and fade away. On headphones, the grain of each part moving on its own comes through clearly.