It may be the strangest first line of any love song. "I may not always love you." The singer opens with a hedge. Wilson and Asher argued over whether the line was too bleak to keep (Far Out). It stayed. Then he reaches for something larger to steady it. As long as there are stars above her, she never needs to doubt him. He will make her sure.
The chorus turns from promise to confession. God only knows what he would be without her. In the bridge he goes further. If she ever left, life would go on, but the world would have nothing left to show him, and he cannot see what good living would do. At the end the title line comes around again and again, the voices layered over one another in a round, until the record fades with the question still in the air.
Here a human love borrows God's name to say how much it means. It swears by the stars because its own word feels too small. The singer admits he does not know himself well enough to promise forever. He knows only that someone else knows him.
The Song and the Singers
Brian Wilson wrote the music in early 1966 for Pet Sounds. The words came from Tony Asher, an advertising copywriter Wilson had brought in as his lyricist (Songfacts). Wilson later said the two of them wrote it in 45 minutes (MusicRadar). They spent much longer arguing about one word.
The word was God. Asher remembered that in 1966 nobody thought you could put God in a pop song unless you were Kate Smith singing "God Bless America" (Wikipedia). They kept it anyway. Capitol was nervous enough to put the song on the B-side of "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and in America it peaked at number 39 (Neon Music). Some radio stations in the South refused to play it (Aleteia).
Wilson sang it first, then gave the lead to his younger brother Carl, whose tenor was lighter than his own (Rolling Stone). He talked about the album in religious terms. "Carl and I were into prayer," he told one interviewer. The brothers held prayer sessions at Brian's house, asking God to let them bring music to people (Vintage Rock). In 2016 he told the Montreal Gazette that they prayed every night for about a month, and that it showed in the harmonies. Of this song he said it was a vision he and Asher shared: "It's like being blind but in being blind, you can see more" (Wikipedia).
Carl died in 1998. Brian died in 2025, at 82. The song outlived the radio stations that banned it. Paul McCartney has called it one of the few songs that bring him to tears (Yahoo News).
As Long as There Are Stars
The singer cannot promise to love forever, so he points to the stars. As long as they are up there, she can be sure of him. It is a lovely line. It is also an oath he has no power to keep. Stars do not answer to him.
They do answer to God, and God made the same oath with no hedge at all. Through Jeremiah he spoke to a people who had broken faith with him and were about to be carried into exile:
Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. (Jeremiah 31:35–36)
The structure is the singer's own. As long as the stars stay, so does the love. The difference is who holds the stars. When God swears by the moon and the stars, he is pointing to his own handiwork and saying his faithfulness will last as long as they do.
Earlier in the same chapter he says it plainly. "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee" (Jeremiah 31:3). The song begins with "I may not always." God begins with "everlasting."
Before I Formed Thee
In ordinary speech, "God only knows" means nobody knows. It is a shrug. Asher and Wilson took the shrug and turned it back into a sentence. The singer truly does not know what he would be without her. Someone does.
Moses drew the same line between what we know and what God knows. "The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever" (Deuteronomy 29:29). What the singer would be without her is one of the secret things. It is not lost. It belongs to someone.
Scripture takes that literally. God told a young man who did not yet know what he would become, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the belly I sanctified thee" (Jeremiah 1:5). Jeremiah was known before there was a Jeremiah. What he would be was settled in God's knowledge before anyone loved him.
The bridge of the song leans hard on one person. If she left, the singer says, he could not see what good living would do. It is the language of devotion, and every lover has felt it. It also asks a human being to carry more than any human can.
Paul told a crowd of Athenian philosophers where a life actually rests. "For in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). He was quoting their own poets. He meant God. A beloved can make life sweet. Only the Maker holds it up.
Thy Maker Is Thine Husband
Isaiah takes the love song and gives God the singer's part. Speaking to a people who felt abandoned, like a wife sent away, he says, "For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name" (Isaiah 54:5). The Maker and the made are bride and groom.
Then the groom makes his vow, and he swears by things larger than stars. "For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee" (Isaiah 54:10). The singer said his love would last as long as the stars. God says his will outlast the mountains.
The singer had to borrow the stars to make his promise. God borrows nothing. The letter to the Hebrews notes that when God made his promise to Abraham, "because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself" (Hebrews 6:13).
Brian Wilson and Tony Asher wrote a love song that could not get through its first line without admitting it might fail. Then they put God's name in the title to hold it up. They reached for the right name.