It’s kind of a no-brainer in the best song ever department, but my first entry for Best Song Ever (This Week) is the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”. It could be because I’ve been rapturously caught up in the first season DVDs of HBO’s “Big Love”, which uses said song as it’s theme, but really my relationship with the Beach Boys runs way deeper than that. Let’s see:

Episode 1 - I’m seven or eight years old, my mom and dad are divorced, but my mom, my sister, and I still make the occasional trip down to Sacramento to visit my family on my dad’s side. On these trips, our aural input is a steady diet of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Bryan Adams, and the Beach Boys (I have this suspicion that my mom set her musical tastes just by raiding the “B” section of a record store one day). My mom always liked the poppy surf-and-cars Beach Boys stuff, not the late-period loony Brian Wilson business, so it was mostly greatest hits cassettes, “409”, “Everybody’s Surfin’”, stuff like that. But every once in a while I must’ve heard “In My Room” and “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It be Nice”, slightly heavier Beach Boys material, because it’s all burned into my brain on a pre-conscious level.

Episode 2 – It’s the Puyallup fair, early 90s, and my mom has taken my sister and I to see Mike Love’s “Beach Boys”, a Brian Wilson-free travesty of Hawaiian shirts, “California Girls”, and John “Uncle Jesse” Stamos on drums. I’d like to say that my pre-teen self inherently knew what a sham I was seeing, but I think I was just genuinely excited about seeing someone from the TV.

Episode 3 – I’m 22, just returned from my obligatory post-collegiate backpack around Europe, and working the graveyard donut-frying shift at Top Pot Donuts on Summit. One of my coworkers there is Adam Miller from the Chromatics, and I quickly learn that one of the downsides of working with an aspiring musical genius is suffering through their highly refined record collection. Along with the Fall and Syd Barrett, Miller liked to play Brian Wilson’s “Smile” (this was before it was reissued, if anyone’s tallying cool points). I never went through a revelatory Pet Sounds phase, but I knew about crazy-ass Brian Wilson from an A&E biography in which he wades into the ocean only after getting a note from his psychiatrist saying that it would be ok. Wilson, of the Beach Boys, was afraid of the ocean, you see. Anyway, I had pretty much zero context for “Smile” and just filed it alongside Sid Barret and Mark E Smith as genius music that I just didn’t enjoy while working a deep fryer at 3am.

Which pretty much brings us to this week’s “Big Love” binge. I’m still not the kind of person who rants about Wilson’s musical genius, although I acknowledge it, and I still mostly think of the Beach Boys as childhood car-ride music. But damn if “God Only Knows” isn’t the best song ever. The production is amazing—the echoing horse trots, the ghostly strings and accordion, the vaguely psychedelic breakdown at the 1:05 minute mark, the rising drum rolls of the song’s crescendo, and, of course, those perfect vocal harmonies. Lyrically, it’s both a tentative love song and an existential lament for love and life’s inevitable fade into the unknown. It’s a must for any morbidly anxious romantic, such as myself, and it’s the Best Song Ever (This Week).