Smile

Product Description

Smile is inarguably the most long-awaited album in modern pop history. It’s been more than 37 years since the title first appeared on a label release schedule, intended as the January 1967 follow-up to the groundbreaking art-rock of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. But Smile never made its initial release date. Today, this album is not a mere reconstruction of past performances, but something entirely new, a serious summation of a project that has been gestating for nearly four decades.

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The Greatest Album That Never Was finally is. The Beach Boys’ uncompleted 1967 album Smile has remained the elusive touchstone of Brian Wilson’s brilliant, star-crossed career for decades. Artistic Holy Grail and troubling professional Waterloo for Wilson, a tantalizing prism of unfulfilled promise to his loyal cadre of fans, its story has become pop music’s Rashomon. Finally completed via spring 2004 recordings with his stellar, longtime touring band (none of the original ’60s sessions were used, though they’ve been recreated here with often stunning authenticity), it’s arguably as alien to contemporary pop as it might have seemed in its intended ’67 context–even to ears freshly primed by the glories of Pet Sounds.

Collaborator Van Dyke Parks’s impressionistic, often mischievous lyrics conjure a collage of arcane 19th-century Americana that’s equal parts artful ellipse and aloof nostalgia. But wed to Wilson’s innovative composition and recording techniques (echoing beat author William Burroughs’s fabled cut ‘n’ paste methodology and exemplified by the modular “Good Vibrations”), the resulting semisuite confections challenge the boundaries of both song and album form, but with an insouciant charm that’s as different from Pet Sounds as that landmark was from “I Get Around.” Turns out those hypothetical comparisons to Sgt. Pepper’s weren’t so far off the mark. –Jerry McCulley

Smiling with Brian
Amazon.com Music Editor Peter Hilgendorf called Brian Wilson to congratulate him on the release of Smile, and to talk about the recording and some of the history behind this highly anticipated release. Listen now.

Catch Up with Brian Wilson and the Legend of Smile:
Here are a few lists to help unravel the stories and sounds of Smile.

• Essential Brian Wilson CDs
• Essential Brian Wilson DVDs
• Essential Brian Wilson books