Before Pet Sounds, rock existed in the declarative, the shouting of the succinct: The Beatles wanted to hold this, the Stones couldn’t get that, the Kinks wanted you then. Even the Beach Boys were content to party there, ankles in the surf, harmonizing salt-flecked snapshots of the Southern California idyll. But on the group’s 11th album, Brian Wilson turned his attention inward, to ask questions without clear answers—and, along the way, invented the modern pop auteur.

Pet Sounds is an album of grand, immediate pleasures: rhapsodic falsettos, deep melodies elated by strings and brass, blips of bike horns and barking dogs. But it also bows to a central humility—the unknowability of love—and in doing so, reaches grace. To other bands, affairs were prizes won and lost, the products of obvious motives and crisp faults. But here, Wilson writes in the wistful, patient meditations of the perennial outsider; he has no explanations on how romance endures, or why it leaves, or where innocence is lost. Whether marveling over his wife’s fidelity in “You Still Believe in Me,” or bidding goodbye to his heart’s ideal on “Caroline, No,” he is wide-eyed. In “God Only Knows,” the most beautiful pop song of the ’60s, Brian and lyricist Tony Asher direct cherubic vocalist Carl Wilson to be helpless with awe, alighting on a willfully unromantic suggestion—that love is a sustained choice, after it’s a lightning bolt—inside a melody so sublime it becomes a sonnet. None of this is delivered in absolutes; Wilson’s most confident resolution on the album is that he doesn’t fit in, that he “just wasn’t made for these times.”

He was ahead of them, while channeling centuries before. On Pet Sounds, Wilson introduces many tropes now central to pop music: the lone savant who conducts the band and the recording studio; the pensive observer, too gentle for this world; and the song cycle, a succession of tracks with entwined emotional and musical motifs. It’s no accident these are contemporary updates on classical composers, like Wilson’s beloved Gershwin and Beethoven. Here, as producer and arranger, he coaxes in elements of their symphonies—plus exotica, baroque, calypso, and a funhouse of eccentric instruments—electronically stacking it all into a roiling wave of sound, topped with the most spiritual and psychedelic harmonies the Beach Boys would ever swoon. Today, Wilson continues to speak to the romantic in every listener, in the radiant spaces between what is known. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: The Beach Boys: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”