Blog Entry 2 - The Beach Boy's Pet Sounds

When the Beach Boys started out they were a co creation of Brian Wilson and his brothers. They brought a new rock and roll sound and used happy sunshine images and surfing songs to ease their audiences into great moods. With Brian Wilson at the helm with his strong composition skills and influences from groups like The Four Freshman they created big and full music filled with beach melodies and advanced quartet like singing melody layers utilizing every voice in the band. It was a totally new sound at the time and was almost immediately  a success upon release. Originally on tour with them, the stress of writing all the music and being constantly on tour got to Brian Wilson and eventually Brian dropped away from touring with the band and devoted all his time to staying back at the studio and composing new material for the band. Even with this new time to write and create at his own free will, Brian Wilson still felt the pressure to keep pushing his music farther because of the growing popularity of The Beatles during that time period. Although the Beach Boys had once been the mash hit band taking America by storm, this immensely popular band was still pushed aside when The Beatles hit stateside. This caused Brian Wilson to take on his greatest task yet; the creation of Pet Sounds, an album meant to contend with the release of the extremely popular Rubber Soul by The Beatles. This album challenged what audiences expected from a rock album. Utilizing a plethora unheard of instruments and objects to create the sounds for his album and bringing in over twenty session musicians, Brian Wilson expanded the realms of studio recorded rock and roll into a new era of creation, surely inspiring The Beatles as much as contending with them. Even in the modern day the amount of and unique use of instrumentation still seems to be on the cutting edge. It almost makes you wonder what happened to the battle between The Beatles and The Beach Boys during that era because I see very little of this influence left over in the modern age in the music I hear. The bands challenged each other back and forth and yet what they were trying to do seems almost completely absent with most groups staying in comfort zones and playing it safe in the modern age. As a professional it actually makes me want to continue their work and keep pushing it forward. After listening to The Beach Boys and some of Brian Wilson's later work such as Smiles, and even what the Beatles did, it truly inspires me to pick up where they left off.