Smile (The Beach Boys album)

Smile
One of the covers prepared by Capitol's art department; illustration by Frank Holmes
Studio album (unfinished) by the Beach Boys
Recorded	February 17, 1966 – May 18, 1967 (initial sessions) June 3, 1967 – July 1971 (later recordings)
Studio	Western Columbia Gold Star Sound Recorders Capitol Beach Boys (Los Angeles)
Genre	Art pop progressive pop psychedelia experimental
Producer	Brian Wilson
The Beach Boys recording chronology
Pet Sounds (1966) Smile (1966–1967) Smiley Smile (1967)

Smile (sometimes stylized as SMiLE)^[1] is an unfinished album by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was intended to follow their 1966 album Pet Sounds. It was to be an LP of twelve tracks assembled from modular fragments, the same editing process used for their "Good Vibrations" single. Instead, after a year of recording, the album was shelved and the group released a downscaled version, Smiley Smile, in September 1967. Over the next four decades, few of the original Smile tracks were officially released, and the project came to be regarded as the most legendary unreleased album in popular music history.^[2][3]

The album was produced and almost entirely composed by Brian Wilson with guest lyricist and assistant arranger Van Dyke Parks, both of whom conceived the project as a riposte to the British sensibilities that had dominated popular music of the era. Wilson touted Smile as a "teenage symphony to God" to surpass Pet Sounds. It was a concept album that was planned to feature word paintings, tape manipulation, more elaborate vocal arrangements, experiments with musical acoustics, themes of youth and innocence, and comedic interludes, with influences drawn from mysticism, pre-rock and roll pop, doo-wop, jazz, ragtime, musique concrète, classical, American history, poetry, spirituality, and cartoons. Over 50 hours of tape was recorded, ranging from musical and spoken word to sound effects and role-playing. The lead single would have been "Heroes and Villains", about the early history of California, or "Vega-Tables", a tongue-in-cheek promotion of organic food.

Numerous issues, including legal entanglements with Capitol Records, Wilson's uncompromising perfectionism and mental instabilities, as well as Parks' withdrawal from the project in early 1967, prevented the album's completion. Most of the tracks were produced between August and December 1966, but few were ever finished, and the album's structure was never finalized. Afraid of the public's reaction to his work, Wilson blocked attempts to release Smile in the subsequent years. After the group issued a truncated version of "Heroes and Villains", they reworked some of the material into new songs, such as "Cool, Cool Water", and completed only three more tracks, "Our Prayer", "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up". A mythology grew around the project, and its unfulfilled potential inspired many artists, especially those in indie rock, post-punk, electronic, and chamber pop genres.

Smile had been estimated to be "50% done" by mid-1967.^[4] Since the 1980s, extensive session recordings have circulated widely on bootlegs, allowing fans to assemble hypothetical versions of a finished album, adding to its legacy as an interactive project. Responding to this, Capitol included a loose reconstruction of the album on the 1993 box set Good Vibrations. In 2004, Wilson, Parks, and Darian Sahanaja arranged a version of Smile for concert performances, billed as Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which Wilson then adapted into a solo album. He stated that this version differed substantially from his original vision.^[5] The 2011 compilation The Smile Sessions was the first official package devoted to the original Beach Boys' recordings and included an approximation of the completed album. It received universal acclaim and won Best Historical Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards in 2013.