Sixty years after Pet Sounds changed the language of pop music forever, The Pet Sounds Sessions (Deluxe Edition) arrives less as a simple reissue and more as a museum-quality excavation of Brian Wilson’s masterpiece. Originally released as a landmark archival box set in 1997, the newly 2026 edition finally makes this enormous body of session material widely accessible again through streaming platforms and updated physical editions. The result is both overwhelming and fascinating: a deep dive into one of the most carefully constructed albums in popular music history.
For longtime Beach Boys fans, this release is almost mythical. The original Pet Sounds Sessions box had become increasingly difficult to find, often circulating through collectors, bootlegs…
Tag Archive: The Beach Boys
For a few minutes in 1976 – America’s bicentennial year and the 15th anniversary of California-sun ambassadors The Beach Boys – the hype was right: Brian Wilson was back. On November 27th, the group’s resident, troubled genius was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. And he was solo, his first TV appearance without brothers Dennis and Carl, Mike Love and Al Jardine since a legendary recital of Surf’s Up in the 1967 documentary Inside Pop. Brian’s three SNL songs included an eerie ‘Good Vibrations’ – alone and skittish at a piano in a faux-sandbox set – and ‘Back Home’, a jaunty original from the Beach Boys’ latest LP, 15 Big Ones, with the SNL band even though the former were in town selling out Madison Square Garden.
Brian also performed ‘Love Is a Woman’, a new…