"I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" is a song by American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1966 album Pet Sounds.

"I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" remains one of the Beach Boys' most celebrated songs, and one closely identified with Wilson's personal life.

"I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" was written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher for the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album in early 1966.

But this one I didn't relate to.”[3] On another occasion, he stated the song evolved from a discussion he had with Wilson about the fact that "[n]either one of us was a particularly popular kid" in high school.

[6] In critic Donald A. Guercio's interpretation: "The lyrics are a first-person chronicle of disillusionment from a narrator who, despite being intelligent, can't find a place where he can comfortably feel like a part of the world.

"[10] Asher stated, "It was definitely a lyric written from Brian's perspective, although during the hours we spent writing, we didn't talk about his socialization per se.

"[3] Granata described it as "[p]erhaps the most sensitive, moving song on Pet Sounds", projecting "an overwhelming sense that the lyric represents Brian's life, his view of himself and his music.

[15] He states that as the bassline descends from the intervals 2 to 7♭, it supports "complex harmonies that alternately suggest both stacked upper thirds and suspended or decorative tones.

[22] Wilson hired session musician Paul Tanner to play Electro-Theremin (an instrument he invented) possibly with the mistaken assumption that he was using a real theremin for the song's recording.

[25] In a 1996 interview, Wilson said that he had been frightened by the "witchy, bewitching sounds" of a theremin as a child, and could not remember "how the heck I ever arrived at the place where I'd want to get one--but we got it.

"[26] At that time, theremins were most often associated with the 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound, but their most common presence was in the theme music for the television sitcom My Favorite Martian, which ran from 1963 to 1966.

"[28] Biographer John Tobler states that Wilson thought of the instrument after having "watched a Bette Davis horror film".

[22] Group vocal overdubs for "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" followed on March 10 and April 13 at Columbia Studio[31] and involved all six Beach Boys.

"Sometimes I feel very sad," the song goes, and no amount of convoluted Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell wordplay is as effective or affecting.

[33] In his self-described "unbiased" review of the album for Record Mirror, Norman Jopling described the song as "a nostalgic ballad, with sympathetic lyrics and a clever sense of development.

"[34] The Who frontman Pete Townshend told Melody Maker that the album was "too remote" and "written for a feminine audience [...] sympathetic to Brian Wilson's personal problems."

"[35] Retrospectively, AllMusic reviewer Donald Gearisco lauded the song as "one of the most moving and powerful tracks in the Beach Boys catalog".

[7] Writing his book Strange Sounds: Offbeat Instruments and Sonic Experiments in Pop (2005), Mark Brend praised Tanner's solo, saying that it "demonstrates perfectly the electro-theremin's appeal.

The pitching is accurate to a degree that only the very best 'real' thereminists' could ever achieve, yet the tone retains the Theremin's haunting ethereal quality – somehow both human-sounding and alien at the same time.

"[23] In 2016, the staff of Treblezine ranked "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" number 3 in their list of the finest songs of the counterculture era, calling it "both a mild rebuke to the temporal world Wilson endured and an intense wish to belong to it.

[37] According to label co-owner Jonathan Poneman, they had been approached by Capitol to issue the single, "knowing that [we had] some Beach Boys enthusiasts", to help promote the upcoming Pet Sounds Sessions box set.