Where is the girl I used to know?

The Beach Boys - 'Caroline, No' (Pet Sounds - 1966)

So here we are, 100 albums later through, In Utero, Hunky Dory, Odelay, Horses, and 95 others and now finally, the Best Album of All Time, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

So how do you do it? How do you end The Best Album of All Time?

In 2007 I had to visit Manchester on a work trip with a colleague, and we drove up. On the way, I had pulled together a CD-R of songs by Manchester bands; Joy Division, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Oasis et al. Due to traffic, the trip took longer than we had hoped. By the time we were zipping underneath the fly-overs off the M62 in the dark, illuminated by orange street lights, we had gotten through all the Manchester songs instead of listening to something that would have been a better fit for the view outside like Unknown Pleasures; we were listening to Pet Sounds. As a result, I always associate this album with a drizzly evening in the North West of England. Probably just me.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Taking Pet Sounds as a whole, you can see the whole album as one where Brian Wilson is moving through an emotional journey; I’d like to think, over a summer. You have the opening track ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ a rare pop song about growing up faster rather than staying young forever. Wilson then takes a journey through the album, learning and exploring across ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ and ‘I Know There’s An Answer’ until we reach the album’s bookend, Wilson has realised that idealised world view of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ hasn’t happened and it isn’t just he has changed, it is Caroline who is a different girl to the one he fell in love with.

Wilson has said of the song;

Probably the best I've ever written. It's a pretty love song about how this guy and this girl lost it, and there's no way to get it back. I just felt sad, so I wrote a sad song.

The song was released as the first solo Brian Wilson single in early 1966 before ending up as the closing track on Pet Sounds. Depending on which version of various autobiographies on Wilson and songwriting collaborator Tony Asher you read, you will get a slightly different take on who first instigated the lyrics or the music that brought the song together. The song was initially titled “Carol, I Know”, which Brian misheard as “Caroline, No”, and Asher felt it was a more interesting and poignant line.

The song’s protagonist reflects on the loss of innocence of his love interest and uses a change of haircut to draw the contrast between her now and then and why the relationship has ended. Some interpret the lament as why the love affair ended, and others as why Caroline did not stay the same as he has done.

Asher has said that Wilson moved the song in a sadder direction, and Wilson's 1991 memoir states that the song derived from an infatuation with a classmate named Carol Mountain.

I'd reminisced to Tony about my high school crush on Carol Mountain and sighed, "If I saw her today, I'd probably think, God, she's lost something because growing up does that to people." But the song was most influenced by the changes [my first wife] Marilyn, and I had gone through. We were young, Marilyn nearing twenty [sic] and me closing in on twenty-four, yet I thought we'd lost the innocence of our youth in the heavy seriousness of our lives.

The final lyrics were inspired by Asher's personal experience visiting his former girlfriend, Carol, who had recently moved to New York City and changed significantly. The song has been interpreted in different ways, with Wilson claiming that it was not written about anyone in particular and was instead about the "death of a quality" within himself.

The song is one of only two songs on the album with just one vocal part,¹ and harpsichords and flutes accompany it. There is a whiff of jazz about the whole song as the delicate, airy percussion can hardly be described as progressing the song, more jogging to keep up. The song was recorded in late January 1966 with some of the usual cast of LA session musicians that featured on other Beach Boys songs. This included Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell and Carol Kaye. None of the other Beach Boys featured their vocal talents on the song as they were away on tour, and as a result, the song wasn’t going to be a Beach Boys song, so it allowed it to have a different feel to the band’s earlier material. Bassist Kaye has said of the recording:

Something must have happened to Brian. I can remember he looked so sad. When he'd catch me checking out his face, he'd look back at me with a kind of deep, unexplainable sad look. I had never seen him like that before. He was happy with the music, though. It seemed to be his expression of some feeling he couldn't put into words. Not much of a tune, just a mood.

At the end of the song, it fades. We get a montage of barking dogs (Brian’s - Banana and Louie) and a train from a 1963 sound effects album called Mister D’s Machine (Train #58, the Owl at Edison, California), while Wilson wanted a horse recorded in the end they stuck with the dog noises and so from those pet sounds came the album’s title of Pet Sounds.

Like the recorded song, the story of the song has a strange coda. Wilson tried to reconnect with Carol Mountain in the autumn of 1966, following a suggestion from their mutual friend Stanley Shapiro. Wilson called every person named Mountain listed in the Hawthorne-Inglewood area until he found Carol's parents, who gave him her address. He and Shapiro then drove to Carol's house, intending to bring her back to Wilson's home, but they were unsuccessful. Carol later recalled that Wilson would often call her at strange hours and want to talk about music. She described the calls as strange, but not inappropriate.

He would also revisit the hair metaphor on 1988’s ‘Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long’ on Brian Wilson, but it was clear that those last two letters at the end of the song made it clear, you can’t go back there. Caroline, No.

Back in 2007, while we travelled through Manchester listening to the dogs and the train that closed out this song, I made a vow that one day I would stand with my feet in the Pacific Ocean on a Californian beach and listen to Unknown Pleasures to complete the circle.

That’s the top 100 done; I hope you’ve enjoyed it - Analysis to come before Christmas, and then we will take some time off over the festive period. - Here is the playlist of everything we’ve covered since we started and the index.

1. The other being ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’