Pet sounds

In the checkout line at Whole Foods the other day, I noticed a glossy new issue of Rolling Stone for sale. Collector's Edition! boasted the cover, and it promised, moreover, an overview of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Who could resist, while waiting to pay for a pineapple and pita chips, at least a look? And so I thumbed to the beginning of the survey, and to the purported top ten, where I found a familiar roster of legendary efforts - the White Album; Highway 61 Revisited; What's Going On? - and one odd outlier. Perched (rather precariously, it seemed to me) at number 2 was the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

The Beach Boys? It's an astounding apotheosis. When I was in high school, and an enthusiastic student of the history of rock, the Beach Boys were far from canonical: sure, we all knew Good Vibrations, and California Girls, but the band was generally seen as too glossy, too easy, to be considered a truly historically significant act. The Beach Boys were like Renoir, or wine coolers: sure, they were nice enough, and you didn't mind spending time with them, but they had no grit, no depth, no greatness.

But the story's been rewritten, over the past decade. Brian Wilson's solo efforts have repeatedly veered into openly experimental terrain, and that prompted a number of critics to rethink the Beach Boys, as well - and their music, which sometimes involved ambient sounds, is now often seen as important to the evolution of the Beatles, and others.

So welcome to the club, Beach Boys. And, in your honor, I'll offer a brief top five list of my own. Here follow my favorite recent sounds from an ever-expanding soundtrack of fatherhood:

1. The vigorous, accelerating sound of footfalls at 6:15 in the morning, as Cleo trots toward our bedroom door, to wake us up.

2. Cleo singing along, in the backseat of the car, to Milkshake's "I Love You." You have to listen closely for this - it's like trying to record the utterances of field mice - but the reward is deeply touching, as she hesitantly completes the chorus by intoning "that much is true."

3. Cleo's pish, a sound that she makes to suggest imaginary actions and transactions. If, for instance, you give her a pretend ticket to a pretend train, she may take it and act as though stamping it while uttering a dramatic pish.

4. A variant on no. 1 that manages to be both excruciating and amusing at the same time: Cleo shouting Daddy! in a curt, commanding voice from her little bed, in the dark of the morning, as she attempts to set the day into motion.

5. Cleo's standby song: The Day of the Week. For more than a month now, at offhanded moments, she's broken into a little chant that usually begins with Sunday, Monday, and may or may not reach the end of the week. Sung in a soft but confident and steady voice, it feels more like a talisman than a catalog of days.