By Allesandro Rotondi

God Only Knows is one of the greatest songs ever written. It’s Paul McCartney’s self-proclaimed favourite song. I first heard it on The Wonder Years, at the end of the fabled episode where Kevin realizes the girl next door was gone forever. She drove away on a bus to summer camp, as Kevin stared into the distance with “God only knows what I’d be without you” chiming over and over again for what felt like an eternity.

Just last week it was featured in the new trailer for Toy Story 4, and much to the same effect, it left a profound impression on all those who watched it. I don’t know what it is about the song—something about it is just so beautiful and pure. And to think it starts with the lines “I may not always love you.” However, it continues with the lines “but long as there are stars above you / you never need to doubt it”, thus completing one of the greatest opening lines of any love song. Ever.

The song is actually ridiculously complex, functioning in two interchanging keys, with a bass line that moves in a chromatic stepwise motion using inversions of the root chord. That probably sounds like a whole lot of mumbo jumbo, and it is. The point is, Brian Wilson could do what most composers cannot. And that is, write a mindblowing-ly complex masterpiece of sonic art, or a “pocket symphony” as his compositions were sometimes labeled, and have most that hear it call it “beautiful in its simplicity.”

The end of the song alone would go down in history as a composer’s primal achievement. It is the perfect vocal round: Dozens of multi-layered voices singing the tagline of the song in interweaving and meandering harmony, only to fade out into infinity. I always picture that once the song has faded, the ending tagline is still looping into eternity somewhere. Thank you Brian Wilson, and thank you to all those who checked out Notes on Notes now, and in the ongoing future. God only knows what we’d be without you.