I would have loved it a lot more if it wasn't shuffled together with Kiss my baby and She knows me too well....those 2 songs really outshine PLMW
Some great discussion of the lyrics to this track on this thread: very thought-provoking, thanks. However, I do want to just make the point that the above post is getting into the realms of personal taste — and as the Rank The Tracks threads show, you rarely ever get Beach Boys fans to agree about the relative merits of the tracks on BB albums! Myself, I think She Knows Me Too Well is the best track on Today, and I put Please Let Me Wonder very close behind it... but Kiss Me, Baby is much more '...Meh' to me.
I mean, this is the Today album we're talking about, here, so it's still pretty GOOD '...Meh', very good in fact — but I think it's '...Wonder' and '...Too Well' that shade 'Kiss...'.
But that's just my tuppeny three farthings' worth...
While we'd never expect (or probably even want) everyone to have the exact same rankings of the songs, the results from the "ranking the tracks" exercises are (IMO) worth examining for what they tell us about the consensus. With that in mind, I did some more compiling last night and here is what we have for the Today! LP (this is all normalized to a 1-10 scale):
Please Let Me Wonder (8.4)
---------------------------------------------8
Kiss Me Baby (7.7)
She Knows Me Too Well (7.5)
In the Back of My Mind (7.4)
When I Grow Up (7.1)
---------------------------------------------7
---------------------------------------------6
Dance, Dance, Dance (5.3)
Do You Wanna Dance (5.1)
Good to My Baby (5.02)
---------------------------------------------5
I'm So Young (4.2)
---------------------------------------------4
Don't Hurt My Little Sister (3.4)
---------------------------------------------3
Help Me Ronda (2.98)
---------------------------------------------2
---------------------------------------------1
Bull Session (0.9)
As mentioned elsewhere, the limitations of ranking LP tracks rather than grading (on, say, a 1-5 scale) is that each LP is considered to be equal in quality, but these results are still interesting, particularly if one looks at the info that can be derived from the patterns in the voting (as opposed to merely the average scores). There's also a bigger (and somewhat exaggerated) difference in the numerical values due to the big differences in range.
Of the top-ranked songs, there is a good bit more disagreement about ITBOMM and KMB than with SKMTW. People who like the former two REALLY like them--they put them in the top two more often than SKNTW, but there are more people who rank them lower. (A different, and possibly preferable form of weighted averaging puts KMB and SKMTW in a virtual dead-head, which is exactly how I personally ranked them--a tie.)
What also emerges from the data is that Side 2 of
Today (when we eliminate the near-perfect low score for "Bull Session With the Big Daddy") has the highest ranking of any LP side in the BBs albums (through BBLY), at 7.05. Side two of
Surf's Up ranks high at 6.88; the only other LP sides averaging over six are Side 2 of
20/20 (6.43), Side 2 of
Holland (6.13), and Side 1 of
Friends (6.07). Again, this might be a good bit different if we were grading the songs on some absolute scale rather than ranking them relative to the LP on which they happen to reside.
To return to the topic of PLMW, the really fascinating question is who altered the lyrics from the early version with Mike singing lead? Did Brian ever actually write lyrics without Mike and then let Mike revise? Or did Brian sometimes tweak some of Mike's word choices? One suspects that there's a little of each that happened, with it being mostly that Mike heard a track or was given a melody and would go off and write them, then bring 'em back, at which point Brian might have some level of editorial input.
I don't remember seeing this specific issue explored here at the board--if there's a thread that does so, please let me know.
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