(2011) The Smile Sessions

The Beach Boys

ReleasedNovember 1, 2011

LabelCapitol Records

Recorded1966–1967

ProducerBrian Wilson

Genres

Primary

Baroque popPsychedelic popProgressive popArt pop

Secondary

Sunshine popSound collage

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Tracks48:13

Movement one17:04

1	Our Prayer	1:05
2	Gee	0:51
3	Heroes and Villains	4:52
4	Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)	3:35
5	I'm in Great Shape	0:28
6	Barnyard	0:48
7	My Only Sunshine	1:55
8	Cabin Essence	3:30

Movement two10:57

1	Wonderful	2:04
2	Look (Song for Children)	2:31
3	Child Is Father of the Man	2:10
4	Surf's Up	4:12

Movement three20:12

1	I Wanna Be Around / Workshop	1:23
2	Vega-Tables	3:49
3	Holidays	2:32
4	Wind Chimes	3:06
5	The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow)	2:35
6	Love to Say Dada	2:32
7	Good Vibrations	4:15

“Good Vibrations” changes key, tempo, mood, and instrumentation repeatedly across three and a half minutes while remaining a pop song of overwhelming emotional power. It was assembled from over ninety hours of tape cut across multiple studios, the most expensive single ever produced to that point¹ (an estimated $50,000, roughly $500,000 in 2026 dollars), and it was the proof of concept for something larger: an album-length work applying the same modular method to a whole suite of American music, taking in barbershop, ragtime, Hawaiian, Western, the avant-garde, and the Beach Boys’ own harmony pushed to its most ecstatic extreme. Brian Wilson called it “a teenage symphony to God.”² The album was never finished. The SMiLE Sessions, assembled forty-four years later from the original multitracks, is the closest we can get to hearing what was attempted and what was lost — and the music is extraordinary enough to justify the mythology that grew in the silence, the record routinely named the most famous unreleased album in popular music.³

Musical and production context

Wilson began the sessions in mid-1966, straight off Pet Sounds, with an ambition that had no precedent in pop. Where Pet Sounds used the Wrecking Crew and Gold Star Studios to build elaborately arranged but structurally conventional songs, SMiLE abandoned conventional song structure entirely. Wilson recorded short musical sections, sometimes only a few bars, at studios across Los Angeles and planned to assemble them in postproduction, building songs from fragments the way a film editor cuts scenes from takes — his engineer Mark Linett’s verdict was that “Brian invented the method of modular recording that we take for granted today.”⁴ The technology of 1966 could barely accommodate it. Each fragment was a self-contained idea, and the composition happened in the sequencing: which fragment followed which, and what the juxtaposition produced.

The sources are too wide to summarize. “Heroes and Villains” shifts between cowboy themes, honky-tonk piano, vocal harmonies of staggering intricacy, and passages of pure abstraction. “Cabin Essence” layers banjo, theremin, and voices into American folk music refracted through a psychedelic prism. “Surf’s Up” is Wilson’s most achingly beautiful composition, the harmonic sophistication of an art song under a Van Dyke Parks lyric whose opacity only deepens the feeling. The very sound of the project’s signature was a new instrument: the eerie high line on “Good Vibrations” is not a theremin but an Electro-Theremin, a slide-controlled device built for the trombonist Paul Tanner, the same instrument Wilson had used on Pet Sounds.⁵ Some fragments name their sources outright — the brief a cappella “Gee” lifts the “how I love my girl” hook from the Crows’ 1953 doo-wop hit and uses it as the intro into “Heroes and Villains,” an explicit homage to the radio-doo-wop Wilson grew up on.⁶ Throughout, the Beach Boys’ harmonies are voiced so closely and so chromatically that the individual singers dissolve into pure chord, the ensemble functioning as one instrument.

The collapse

The album fell apart for interlocking reasons, and the deepest was Wilson himself. His mental health was deteriorating under the weight of his ambitions and heavy LSD use; his collaborator Van Dyke Parks watched it happen and later said he knew Wilson was “headed for psychological collapse.”⁷ Mike Love and Al Jardine resisted material they found uncommercial, pretentious, and impossible to perform live, and Capitol Records wanted another “Good Vibrations,” not an avant-garde art project.⁸ The work itself turned ominous. For “The Elements: Fire,” Wilson had the studio players wear toy fireman’s helmets and set a small fire burning so they would smell smoke as they recorded; when buildings nearby and across Los Angeles caught fire in the following weeks, he became convinced the music was producing the flames and shelved the piece, locking the tapes away.⁹

The competitive pressure from the Beatles, who had answered Pet Sounds with Revolver and were now building Sgt. Pepper’s, finished it. In early 1967 Wilson heard “Strawberry Fields Forever” on his car radio and reportedly pulled over, fearing the Beatles had already reached the territory he was heading toward.¹⁰ Sgt. Pepper’s, released that June while SMiLE remained unfinished, confirmed the dread, and by the summer of 1967 the band had abandoned the project.¹¹ Smiley Smile, the album released in its place that September, reworked fragments of the sessions stripped of their orchestration and re-recorded at home — an intimate, lo-fi record with its own strange beauty that preserved a fraction of what had been planned.¹²

What it inherits and what it introduces

SMiLE inherits everything Wilson had developed through Pet Sounds — the Wall of Sound production principles, the chamber-pop arrangements, the harmony vocabulary — and pushes all of it into genuinely avant-garde territory. What it introduces, even in posthumous reconstruction, is the pop album as a collage of American sounds and myths: a musical equivalent of the mural or the great American novel, folding folk, classical, popular, and experimental traditions into one sustained work. The modular technique — composing from independently recorded fragments rather than tracking whole performances — anticipated the working methods of hip hop sampling and electronic production by decades; Linett’s phrase was that Wilson “was making a record tailor-made for something like Pro Tools, but trying to do it 40 years ago,” with analog tape and razor blades.¹³

Reception

Because there was no album to receive in 1967, the reception is really the reception of the 2011 release, and it was rapturous. The SMiLE Sessions met near-universal critical acclaim — a Metacritic score of 96 across more than twenty reviews, among the highest the site records¹⁴ — and won the Grammy for Best Historical Album at the 2013 ceremony.¹⁵ Rolling Stone folded the 2011 set into its 2012 revision of the 500 Greatest Albums at No. 381, a rare instance of a reissue entering the canon on the strength of music recorded decades earlier.¹⁶ What the reviews registered was less a new record than a restored one: the long-rumored masterpiece, finally audible in close to the form its maker intended.

Influence and legacy

The SMiLE mythology extends beyond the music. The archetype of the ambitious unreleased album — from Prince’s Black Album to Lauryn Hill’s never-recorded follow-up to The Miseducation — descends from Wilson’s collapse.¹⁷ Before SMiLE, an unfinished album was a failure; after it, an unfinished album could be a legend, the silence itself generating a mythology no completed work could match. Musically, the sessions echo through the art pop and experimental traditions of the 2000s: Animal Collective, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink, and the broader freak-folk and neo-psychedelic movements all work in its wake, drawn to its fusion of harmonic beauty and structural daring.

Wilson eventually completed the music himself: Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, an all-new solo re-recording, premiered at London’s Royal Festival Hall in February 2004 to a five-minute standing ovation and brought the work to a wide audience for the first time.¹⁸ But the 2011 Sessions, assembled by Mark Linett and Alan Boyd with Wilson supervising, is the definitive document — the original Beach Boys vocals and Wrecking Crew tracks preserved in the state of beautiful incompletion where their creator left them.¹⁹

MAP

Explorer

The Smile Sessions

Musical and production context

The collapse

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

MAP

Explorer

The Smile Sessions

Musical and production context

The collapse

What it inherits and what it introduces

Reception

Influence and legacy

See also

Footnotes