Smile

Smile (stylized as SMiLE) is an unfinished album by the American rock band the Beach Boys, conceived as the follow-up to their 1966 album Pet Sounds. The project—a concept album involving themes of Americana, humor, youth, innocence, and the natural world—was planned as a twelve-track LP assembled from modular fragments, the same editing process used on their single "Good Vibrations". After a year of recording, the album was shelved and a downscaled version, Smiley Smile, was released in September 1967. The original project came to be regarded as the most legendary unreleased album in popular music history.

The album was produced and primarily composed by Brian Wilson with guest lyricist and assistant arranger Van Dyke Parks, together envisioning the project as a Rhapsody in Blue–influenced riposte to contemporary rock trends and the British Invasion. Wilson touted Smile as a "teenage symphony to God", intended to surpass Pet Sounds and inaugurate the band's Brother Records imprint. Consuming over 50 hours of tape across more than 80 recording sessions, its content ranged from musical and spoken word to sound effects and role-playing. Its influences spanned mysticism, classical music, ragtime, pre–rock and roll pop, jazz, doo-wop, musique concrète, and cartoons. Planned elements included word paintings, tape manipulation, acoustic experiments, comedic interludes, and the band's most challenging and complex vocals to this point. The projected lead singles were "Heroes and Villains", about early California history, and "Vega-Tables", a 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, delayed the album. Most tracks were produced between August and December 1966, but few were finished, and its structure was never finalized. Fearing the public's reaction, Wilson blocked its release. A mythology bolstered by journalists present at the sessions soon surrounded the project. Long the subject of debate and speculation over its tracks and sequencing, Wilson's unfulfilled ambitions inspired many musicians and groups, especially those in indie rock, post-punk, electronic, and chamber pop genres.

Smile was reported to be half-finished before pared-down versions of six tracks were issued on Smiley Smile; further material was reworked into new songs such as "Cool, Cool Water". From 1968 to 1971, three additional tracks—"Our Prayer", "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up"—were completed by the band. 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. In 2004, Wilson, Parks, and Darian Sahanaja rearranged Smile for live performances, billed as Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which Wilson later adapted into a solo album. He considered this version to be substantially different from his original vision. The 2011 compilation The Smile Sessions included the first official approximation of the Beach Boys' completed album and received universal acclaim.

Background

By the end of 1965, having withdrawn from concert tours, Wilson had distanced himself from his bandmates and networked further within the Los Angeles music scene while increasingly using drugs such as marijuana, LSD (or "acid"), and Desbutal. He forged a close relationship with Loren Schwartz, an aspiring talent agent, and sought to make the Beach Boys' eleventh studio album, Pet Sounds, a clear departure from previous releases. He opted not to work with his usual lyricist, bandmate Mike Love, and instead collaborated mainly with jingle writer Tony Asher, at Schwartz's recommendation. In December of that year, Byrds member David Crosby introduced Wilson to Van Dyke Parks, a songwriter, arranger, session musician, and former child actor who had relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to play in local folk revival scenes.

On February 17, 1966, Wilson began recording "Good Vibrations", first intended for Pet Sounds but later excluded due to his dissatisfaction with the initial recording, experimenting with several arrangements until April. On May 4, during the fourth session for "Good Vibrations", he began recording the track in sections rather than as one continuous performance, intending to splice the segments together later. Through 1966, Parks briefly signed with MGM Records, who released his first two singles, and played on albums by the Byrds and other acts, after which his activity centered on select Warner Bros. pop groups.

Through Parks or Bruce Johnston, Wilson was introduced to former Beatles press officer Derek Taylor, soon recruited as the Beach Boys' publicist and initiator of a promotional campaign that branded Wilson as a pop "genius". Pet Sounds was released on May 16 and immediately became a landmark album for its sophisticated orchestral arrangements and its role in positioning the Beach Boys among top rock innovators. In the U.S., the album confused their fans and sold worse than previous Beach Boys releases, whereas the British embraced it warmly. This UK success encouraged Wilson to take greater creative risks and convinced Capitol Records to support his next ambitious project.

Artwork and packaging

Capitol assigned Smile the catalog number DT2580 and produced at least two slightly varied album jackets. The album was to include cover artwork and a booklet of pen-and-ink drawings by graphic artist Frank Holmes, a friend of Parks. Holmes met with Wilson and Parks around June 1966, basing his work on lyric sheets provided by them, and completed his contributions by October. Parks felt that Holmes' illustrations profoundly influenced the project, serving as the album's "third equation" and framing its creative direction in cartoon terms.

Holmes based the cover on an abandoned jewelry store near his Pasadena home. regarding the storefront as "something that would be pulling you into the world of Smile". The cover features a husband and wife rendered in an early-Americana, 19th-century style. According to Vosse, the smile shop idea had derived from Wilson's "humor album" concept, and "everybody who knew anything about graphics, and about art, thought that the cover was not terribly well done [...] but Brian knew better". Parks felt that Holmes, expected to create a "light-hearted" design with no specific instructions, ultimately provided an effective visual framework for the project and viewed his work as a fundamental aspect of its identity: "I think of Smile in visual terms".

Wilson approved the design and submitted it to Capitol. In September 1966, Capitol began production on a normal cover (not gatefold as has sometimes been claimed) with a 12‑page booklet featuring color photographs from a November 7 Beach Boys photoshoot in Boston by Guy Webster, alongside Holmes' illustrations. In early…