Tue
Apr
22
Pet Sounds
The writing/recording process of The Beach Boys’ legendary Pet Sounds is hugely absorbing. Brian Wilson famously hired an advertising copywriter who had previously written jingles to collaborate with him on lyrics:
In early January Wilson contacted Tony Asher, a young lyricist and copywriter who had been working on advertising jingles, and whom Wilson had met in a Hollywood recording studio months earlier. Within ten days they were writing together. Wilson played him some of the music he had been recording, and gave him a cassette of the finished backing track for a piece with the working title “In My Childhood”; it had lyrics, but Wilson refused to show them to Asher, who took the music away and wrote new lyrics. The result was eventually retitled “You Still Believe in Me” and the success of the piece convinced Wilson that Tony Asher was the collaborator he was looking for.