smile

Smile (stylized as SMiLE) is an unfinished album by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was planned to follow their 11th studio album Pet Sounds (1966). It was to be a 12-track LP that drew from over 50 hours of interchangeable sound fragments, similar to the group's 1966 single "Good Vibrations". 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.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, elaborate vocal arrangements, experiments with musical acoustics, and comedic interludes, with influences drawn from mysticism, pre-rock and roll pop, doo-wop, jazz, ragtime, musique concrète, classical, American history, poetry, and cartoons. The lead single would have been "Heroes and Villains", a Western musical comedy, or "Vega-Tables", a satire of physical fitness.
Numerous issues, including legal entanglements with Capitol Records, Wilson's mental instabilities and Parks' withdrawal from the project, prevented the album's completion and release. Most of the backing tracks were produced between August and December 1966, but few vocals were ever recorded, and the album's structure was never finalized. Afraid of the public's reaction to his work, Wilson blocked attempts to complete Smile in the subsequent decades. As its legend grew, the project's unfulfilled potential inspired many fans and musicians, particularly those in indie rock, post-punk, and chamber pop genres. After the 1980s, bootlegged tracks circulated widely, allowing fans to assemble their own hypothetical versions of the finished album. In response, 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, titled Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which Wilson then adapted into a solo album. He stated that this version differed substantially 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 Best Historical Album at the 55th Grammy Awards.

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