Smile (The Beach Boys Album)
Smile (occasionally typeset with partial capitalization as SMiLE) is a partially recorded concept album by the Beach Boys originally intended to be the follow-up album to Pet Sounds. Due to circumstance, Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson abandoned large portions of the session output he recorded from May 1966 to May 1967 and recorded the wildly different Smiley Smile album in its place. During the years Smile remained unavailable, it had come to be regarded as the most famous unreleased album of all time.
The project was re-imagined and released by Wilson in 2004 as Brian Wilson Presents Smile though Wilson himself has stated that the Smile of 2004 differed substantially from what the Smile of the mid-1960s would have been. During the 37 years from its cancellation to the release of Wilson's version, Smile had acquired considerable mystique, and bootlegged tracks from the album circulated widely among Beach Boys collectors. Many of the tracks which were originally recorded for Smile eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys albums.
On October 31, 2011, The Smile Sessions was released featuring an approximation of what the completed album may have sounded like, the first disc being reconstructed to largely follow the template of the 2004 Brian Wilson album. Along with this approximation, a sequence of completed surviving recordings, along with many unreleased session highlights and outtakes were made available through a box-set. It received unanimous critical acclaim. In 2012, it was ranked number 381 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. In 2013, it won the Best Historical Album award at the 55th Grammy Awards.
Read more about Smile (The Beach Boys Album): Conception, Original Themes and Ideas, Recording Process, Promotional Campaign, Project Collapse, Aftermath, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words smile, beach and/or boys:
“Stretched out before her, Rachel curls and curves,
Eyelids and lips apart, her glances filled
With satisfied ferocity; she smiles,
As beasts smile on the prey they have just killed.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“By school age, many boys experience pressure to reveal inner feelings as humiliating. They think their mothers are saying to them, “You must be hiding something shameful.” And shucking clams is a snap compared to prying secrets out of a boy who’s decided to “clam up.””
—Ron Taffel (20th century)