The Danger of Feeling Known: The Beach Boys - “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”

It’s affirming to hear a song echo how you feel, especially so when it puts you at ease, and to feel known via art can sometimes feel like a close personal relationship with the artist themself. On a recent re-listen to the timeless Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, I found myself doing just that, particularly with the song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times''. The times, as of late, have been tough. I’ve realized how much energy I get from going out and doing things, and how much of a life-sap not being able to leave the house very often has been. I’m not built for it, and although no one is, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to reckon with. This song found me at a particular moment, and it felt like a friend.

I was at a Joanna Newsom concert in 2019, and she stopped the show maybe a third of the way through to finetune her harp, which I can only imagine is an insanely intricate process. Nevertheless, she took it in stride, tuning and, at the same time, fielding questions from the audience. “Who’s your favorite composer?” “It has to be Debussy.” “Which dress are you wearing tonight?” “This one is an Ys dress” (Rodarte created a series of dresses corresponding to each of her albums). Slowly, though, the topics turned more personal, about motherhood, and her life with her husband, Andy Samberg. Notably, Samberg and Newsom have a daughter, but are tight-lipped about the details of her life, for example, her name is a guarded secret. So it was a little weird when, in a crowd full of people who were very aware of that situation, someone yelled out “Tell us a story about your daughter!” The rest of the crowd was quick to call out the miscreant, so as not to throw Joanna too far off her game, but it made me wonder about how people perceive the artist-listener relationship. This person at least partially believed they might get an answer, that they, for some reason, were close enough to Joanna Newsom to get information that she very intentionally does not give out. How does one even have the impulse to inquire about something so personal from someone they’ve never met? We spend insane amounts of hours listening to our favorite artists pour their emotions out on tape, certainly this must develop some sort of attachment. I’ve listened to Pet Sounds hundreds of times, and I won’t lie, I’ve wondered if head Beach Boy Brian Wilson and I would be friends more than once.

I thought that maybe, if I inquired, he might have some advice for me that would help me find my footing in “these times”. He had succeeded after all, against all adversity, he became one of the great ‘Mount Rushmore’ figures of rock and roll. He broke through, and from Pet Sounds on out, influenced all of rock music, whether the people making it knew it or not. I’d even settle for a “just keep at it”, or a “work on yourself.” Any direction at all from someone who’s been through this same feeling and not only got away, but became better for it. I went searching, how does he talk about this song? Maybe what I was looking for was mentioned in an interview somewhere: I ended up watching maybe an hour and a half of interviews before I found my answer. Wilson didn’t feel the song was so much about himself not meshing with the times, but the times not being built to his personal standards. He felt, maybe rightly so, that he was far ahead of his time, and that he couldn’t relate to anyone because they just weren’t advanced enough yet. Personally, I can’t relate, but that might be a good thing. Firstly because developing a superiority complex would probably only accelerate any alienation I’m feeling to critical levels, but also because maybe it’s not the healthiest thing to confide in people I don’t know and really never will. For the time being, I think I’ll stick to listening and coming up with my own conclusions, rather than taking advice from total strangers.