The Smile Sessions by The Beach Boys
The Smile Sessions is a compilation album and box set released by American rock band the Beach Boys on October 31, 2011 that focuses on abandoned recording sessions which – if completed – would have followed the Beach Boys' eleventh studio album Pet Sounds. It features comprehensive session highlights and outtakes, while the first 19 tracks comprise an approximation of what the completed Smile album might have sounded like based on a template established in 2004 for the rerecorded Brian Wilson Presents Smile.
<i>Smile</i> is firmly entrenched as the great album that never was. Forty-five years after the fact, historians and archeologists are still trying to put the pieces together. <i>Smile</i> was planned as the follow-up to the landmark <i>Pet Sounds</i>, with the goal of establishing Brian Wilson as the creative better to Lennon and McCartney. Except Wilson lost his way; he became obsessed with the process and couldn't finalize his magnum opus. (Dissent within The Beach Boys didn’t help.) While there's no way to know what the “final” version of this album would have been, this exhaustive collection (featuring work spread over 80 sessions in nine months) lets us eavesdrop on the process. Wilson’s ambitions can be heard closest to fruition on what constitutes the first “disc.” But this release's purpose is to satisfy hardcore Beach Boys fan, who'll thrill to the 34 pieces of “Heroes and Villains,” the five parts of “Do You Like Worms,” the eight-plus minutes of the “Smile Backing Vocals Montage,” and the 24 parts of “Good Vibrations” that not only provide fantastic music but incredible insights into Wilson’s artistic process.
