It certainly wasn’t a good omen when 2025 opened with the unexpected passing of David Lynch, but losing cornerstones of modern pop music such as Brian Wilson and D’Angelo since then has made it a particularly tough year. In between their time out on the road playing high-energy sets at major music events like Newport Folk Festival and opening for Fitz and the Tantrums, Philadelphia funk-R&B jam band SNACKTIME managed to set aside studio time to record an homage to two of their greatest musical icons: the late Beach Boys frontman and the artist who all but invented contemporary soul music, D’Angelo.
The result is a cover of The Beach Boys’ eternal hit “God Only Knows” in the smooth style of D’Angelo, opening as minimal R&B (with a pretty spot-on recreation of Wilson’s falsetto) before the full horn section and backing vocals join in. “When Brian Wilson passed away, we instantly felt the need to show our ultimate appreciation for his genius and the gifts he bestowed upon the world,” the group shares. “We took one of our favorite songs and put it through the lens of our north star, D’Angelo. With the track done and slated to be uploaded, our hero [D’Angelo] sadly left this world. We will feel the crater of both legends’ absences forever. We will try our best to honor them both with our version of the inimitable ‘God Only Knows.’ The verse will reverberate in our hearts forever: ‘If you should ever leave me / Life would still go on, believe me / The world could show nothing to me / Then what good would living do me?’”
The cover arrives with a performance video, which you can view below, and lands ahead of a quick West Coast tour set for December ahead of a New Year’s show in their hometown of Philly and additional East Coast shows planned for February. Find all of those dates listed here.
