Talk:Pet Sounds

The track listing states that the lead vocals were done by Carl Wilson with Bruce Johnston and Brian Wilson. Although the source for the vocals only specifically credits Carl as the lead vocalist, the other two are credited with bridge vocals/tag outro vocals. It appears to me to be more like harmony vocals (which aren't listed in the lead vocal section for any other song). What I'm getting at is, should it just list Carl Wilson on lead vocals? or should Johnston and B. Wilson still be included? HGP7 (talk) 17:09, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

@ILIL, thank you very much for helping here; I admit I am cutting away pretty heavily and so I appreciate the restoration of nuance; I hope I'm not creating an undue amount of work for you.

The "goal" in terms of word count should be 9,000; that's the amount recommended by the Manual of Style, and unless its a particularly broad concept, people start having concerns above it. There's a couple of general things I think can help get us closer to this:

- If multiple critics have similar viewpoints on the topic, we can summarize their general viewpoint rather than using individual quotes. We don't even have to namedrop them unless they are particularly noteworthy or they're making a claim likely to be challenged. The band members themselves are obviously important to credit to any specific opinions, but we can paraphrase them if the exact wording isn't as important to understanding their point (but if they're just being cited to discuss some factual occurrence, and there's no suspicion or counterevidence against this, we can probably just say it in wikivoice).

- We can use WP:SUMMARYSTYLE pretty heavily when discussing individual songs, since they all have their own articles we can include more detailed information on.

- The legacy and influence on other bands can still be cut down a bit; in general, because so many bands are influenced by this album, I think it might be WP:UNDUE to include bands who have only mentioned it themselves as an inspiration. We should be include bands which secondary sources mention were inspired by the album.

- A lot of the notes are a little superfluous; we should think of them less as addendums to include additional information, and more as a means to help readers understand the given information. To give two random examples, nb 54 and nb 6 are just extra information, while nb 1 and nb 7 are useful context that helps verify or present varied takes on a particular claim. We should try to remove the former type, but preserve the latter.

- The number of Fair Use files is at a point where people might take issue; Wikipedians can be pretty big sticklers on keeping that to the minimal needed to understand a concept. For comparison with some current album FAs, Smiley Smile has 3, Thriller (album) has none at all, OK Computer has 3, and The Dark Side of the Moon has 3. I think we should choose the 3 most important audio files to keep and ditch the rest. The fair use image of Brian with the goat i think is also superfluous; is this really needed to understand the concept when the album cover itself exists? Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 01:49, 20 March 2026 (UTC)