Smile (The Beach Boys album)

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. Over the next four decades, few of the original Smile tracks were officially issued, and the project became 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, 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 single was either "Heroes and Villains", about early California history, or "Vega-Tables", a satirical 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 to his avant-garde work, Wilson blocked its release. A mythology bolstered by journalists present at the sessions soon surrounded the project. Long the subject of intense debate and speculation over its unfinished tracks and elusive tracklist, Wilson's unfulfilled ambitions inspired many musicians and groups, especially those in indie rock, post-punk, electronic, and chamber pop genres.

Smile was estimated to be "50% done" by mid-1967. Pared-down versions of "Heroes and Villains", "Vega-Tables", and four other songs were issued on Smiley Smile; further material was reworked into new songs such as "Cool, Cool Water". Three additional tracks—"Our Prayer", "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up"—were completed for the albums 20/20 and Surf's Up. 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 response, Capitol included a loose reconstruction on the 1993 box set Good Vibrations. 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 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 the Best Historical Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards in 2013.