I know there's an answer

When life takes a turn for the jinky, I like to turn to musical comfort food to help surf through the weirdness.

So this morning, when I hopped on my bicycle to ride from my home in Arden Arcade (a suburb in Sacramento County, northeast of downtown and just west of Carmichael) across Business 80 and through North Sacramento, over whatever they named the drainage ditch that parallels the old Western Pacific tracks, "Steelhead Creek" or something like that, and down West El Camino over Interstate 5 to the Starbucks at Gateway Oaks, then down Gateway Oaks to the office, I cued up an old favorite, perhaps my favorite album of all time, the Beach Boys' 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds.

With an opener like "Wouldn't It Be Nice," with its upbeat notion of flowering love's promise, it occurred to me that I might be rubbing a little salt in my wounds. But not really. The album's trajectory runs from promise to fulfillment to disillusionment, and anyway I kinda decided that, rather than wallow in country 'n' western bitterness or the done me wrong blues, I'd try to reawaken that dessicated romantic sense in me, even if it hurt a bit at first.

Pet Sounds is an old, dear friend. I remember looking at it in a rack at the Bigg & Littel department store on Waterloo Road in like 1966 as a sensitive 11-year-old, and deciding to spend my money on a Beach Boys greatest hits package instead. By the time I started paying attention to rock journalists, who uniformly showered it with glowing superlatives, Capitol had discontinued the album, and it had disappeared from stores.

So my introduction with it was after the Beach Boys signed with Warner/Reprise, and their new label packaged Pet Sounds (in mono, the way Brian Wilson recorded it) as a twofer with Carl and the Passions/So Tough, which came out in 1972, if I recall correctly. The new album had one great song, "Marcella," and some other stuff that wasn't so hot, but Pet Sounds hit me like a ton of bricks. I guess I was ready for it at the ripe old age of 17.

I'd never heard anything like it, really. I mean, some of the Beach Boys' songs that preceded it, like side two of Today, with "Please Let Me Wonder," "She Knows Me Too Well" and others, hinted at Brian's new, soulful direction, but the stuff on "Pet Sounds," from heartbreakingly heavenly love songs like "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," "God Only Knows" and "Caroline, No," to more existential statements like "I Know There's an Answer" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (a self-pity anthem for the awkwardly shy teen if ever there was one), and even the two instrumentals ("Let's Go Away for Awhile," the b-side of the single "Good Vibrations," and the title track), were coming from a different world, one that touched an emotional body I didn't know I had.

The arrangements were always imaginative, even if a couple of them got a little clunky in places. And Mike Love's reedy nasal whine has never been one of my favorite voices in popular music (give me Brian or Carl Wilson any day over Love), got grating at times, like "That's Not Me." But the home runs were out of the park, like the bridge and coda in "God Only Knows," or the arching heavenward melody on the line "I'm glad I went, now I'm that much ore sure that we're ready" in "That's Not Me." Aah, bliss.

What I love most about Brian Wilson's songwriting is that his melodic sense isn't mechanical; his melodies come from that same raiment of divinity that I hear in Bach's music, that sense of eternal springtime unfolding. Wilson's melodies move through the air like a flock of birds taking unexpected sweeps and dives in the light of sunrise, if that makes any sense. It does to me.

I listened to Pet Sounds again on the ride home. The beauty of it is that Brian's Wilson's 1966 masterpiece is awakening something in me that has seemed dead for quite a while, that sense of the possibilities of love. And that's not a bad thing, right?