SMiLE

About SMiLE

Smile is an unfinished album by American rock band the Beach Boys that was planned to follow their 11th studio album, Pet Sounds (1966). It was to be a twelve-track concept LP assembled from short, interchangeable musical fragments similar to the group's 1966 single "Good Vibrations". Instead, in September 1967, the group released Smiley Smile, a downscaled version of the album. 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 the history of popular music. The album was produced and almost entirely composed by Brian Wilson with guest lyricist Van Dyke Parks. Wilson touted Smile as a "teenage symphony to God" and identified its genre as "contemporary American music". He planned to include sound effects, comedic interludes, and found object explorations, with influences drawn from classical, folk, doo-wop, pre-rock and roll pop, spirituality, early Americana, Romantic poetry, and the nascent psychedelic movement. The lead single would have been "Heroes and Villains", a Western musical comedy, or "Vega-Tables", a satire of physical fitness. more »