"God Only Knows" and It's Completely Different but Also Still "God Only Knows"

RIP Brian Wilson. Sorry for changing your melody

Damn it’s been a while. In the hullabaloo of accidentally going viral (more on that soon), I have to admit I totally forgot about my email list. Do people still read it? Will someone comment if you got this far?

Anyway, this is going to be a pretty short one (estimated: 2-5 minutes depending on your reading speed). Today is Bandcamp Friday and a cover I did is on this Beach Boys Club compilation¹ that just came out that features quite a few cool DIY artists, including known Sun Kin associates like Planet 81 and Bromf. All proceeds go to the Oakland Immigrant Family Defense Fund. Fuck ICE, in case it bears repeating (it does).

‘God Only Knows’ is a song I’ve been covering since I was 16 years old and listening to since I torrented every album on the “Rolling Stones Top 500 Albums of All Time”. My Dad is a huge classic rock and pop guy but stayed solidly on the British side of the pond, so my Beach Boys knowledge pretty much all started here. I’ll spare you the description of how it felt to listen to the album for the first time, as it’s been done to death, but suffice it to say that I’ve learned like 395876 chords from that song alone; every couple years I pull it out and get obsessively inspired by a different chord change.

Covering one of The Classic Songs felt like it requires an editing of the arrangement. So the concept for my cover was “what if Elliott Smith covered ‘God Only Knows’? Simple, right? Add desperate quietude into the vocals and let intricate acoustic guitar fingerpicking patterns explore the chords like thorny vines. But making this work required a degree of heresy I didn’t quite realize while composing the arrangement. RIP Brian and sorry for changing your melody. I like to think he would at least appreciate the panache.

That’s it for now. Welcome to anybody who just found me through an online video, and I feel especially grateful for anyone who’s been listening for a while. Thank you thank you thank you.

<3 Kabir

P.S. Sun Kin is playing a show at DSP Studios on March 31st. Grab tickets here :)

1. Eagle-eyed Sun Kin historians might recall that I was also on the last one of these, doing my version of “Til I Die”.