Rick Rubin’s favourite song from The Beach Boys album ‘Pet Sounds’
Rick Rubin knows a thing or two about music. Born in 1963, he founded Dep Jam Records in his senior year of high school, relying on the school’s four-track recorder to put out the label’s first releases. By the 1980s, Rubin was one of the most influential people in the music industry and helped to cement the fame of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. As a producer, he’s worked closely with groups like Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Stokes, Audioslave, Rage Against The Machine and countless others.
Who better, then, to establish the greatest album of all time? During his interview with Lex Fridman, the producer was asked to listen to three iconic albums: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds – all LPs which frequently rank at the top of Greatest Albums lists. But for Rubin, ranking albums in this way was complete anathema.
“In art, there’s no metric that makes sense,” he explained. “So, you can put numbers on things, but it’s like, ‘is this apple better than this peach.’ Like, it’s not really a fair comparison. Even when pushed for an answer, Rubin still resisted. “I think it’s a very personal decision. I think you can make your choice to represent the human species, and I’ll pick mine, you know.”
While Rubin refused to reduce music to a single representative LP, he did discuss his love of The Beach Boys, even naming his favourite song from Pet Sounds. “The opening track, that’s the song,” he said, referring to ‘Would’t It Be Nice’. The ultimate encapsulation of young love, this particular track was geared towards the band’s teen fanbase, hence the hefty focus on the future. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?” Wilson sings. “Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long/ And wouldn’t it be nice to live together/ In the kind of world where we belong?”
It’s cheesy as hell, but there’s sadness in there too. In Wilson, Mike Love and Tony Asher’s lyrics, love is the antidote to isolation. “And after having spent the day together /Hold each other close the whole night through,” The Beach Boys sing. This youthful idealism is juxtaposed with the knowledge that adolescent love must necessarily come to an end, thus imbuing the track with a sense of foreboding at complete odds with Wilson’s chirpy melodies.
“That’s part of their trip, though,” Rubin added, reminding us that one of the things that makes Pet Sounds so listenable is that friction between blissful euphoria and simmering anxiety. You can revisit the album below.
