The Beach Boys - God Only Knows - 1966 - Instrumental version - The best song of all time?

"God Only Knows" is a song by American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1966 album Pet Sounds. Written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, it is a Baroque-style love song distinguished for its harmonic innovation and its subversion of typical pop music formula. It is often praised as one of the greatest songs ever written and as the Beach Boys' finest record.
The best song of all time? Hard to argue with The Beach Boys' “God Only Knows,” in which Brian Wilson one-ups The Beatles Revolver with a singular melody, divine harmonies and the undisputed best French horn hook in rock history.
The song's musical sophistication is demonstrated by its multiple contrapuntal vocal parts and weak tonal center (competing between the keys of E and A).
It's not really in any one key. It's a strange song. That's just the way it was written. ... It's the only song I've ever written that's not in a definite key, and I've written hundreds of songs.
-Brian Wilson, 2008
Wilson produced the record between March and April 1966, enlisting about 20 session musicians who variously played drums, sleigh bells, plastic orange juice cups, clarinets, flutes, strings, French horn, accordion, guitars, upright bass, harpsichord, and a tack piano with its strings taped. The song contains a recurring melodic motif that is reinforced by the lead vocal and the line played on French horn.
* Musician Andy Gill identified the verse and chorus melodies as variations on the same line, and added that this type of melodic variation was "very" similar to the technique as it is used in classical pieces such as Delibes' Lakmé. To Lambert, the song's use of vocal counterpoints evoked the sacred traditions of a cantata by Bach or an oratorio by Handel.
* Disc & Music Echo referred to the song as "a standard gem with its hymnal feel.''
* Historian John Robert Greene identified the song as "one of the most complex-and beautiful-songs in the annals of American popular music"
* Bono remarked that the string arrangement was "fact and proof of angels."
* Barry Gibb said that it "blew the top of my head off ... My first thought was, oh dear, I'm wasting my time, how can I ever compete with that? We've [the Bee Gees] been competing with that ever since.
* The Beatles' "Here, There And Everywhere" was inspired by this song. John Lennon and Paul McCartney heard Pet Sounds at a party and went back to Lennon's house to write it. Paul McCartney once called "God Only Knows" "The greatest song ever written.".
* In 2008, Popdose staff members ranked it the best single of the previous 50 years, writing, "It is simply one of the most beautifully composed and arranged songs in the history of not just pop music, but Western music. To place 'God Only Knows' in its proper context is to [place it with] 1836 Frédéric Chopin.

[@charlesarizona]

Well yes it's an interesting melody, with a nice romantic mood, and some counter-intuitive chord changes. Definitely worth listening to carefully, if only because it violates conventional expectations. But when all is said and done, it's still pop music.