Day 27: Brian Wilson – Smile

Album cover courtesy of Nonesuch

I had a bit of a Beach Boys summer this year. I’d been listening to them a lot more after watching that documentary that came out about them last year, and they were even more on my radar after Brian Wilson died. Scotland had some bursts of heatwaves during the summer so I spent more time than usual driving to the coast and listening to their earlier albums. But I still haven’t listened to Smile.

As an album, Smile was 40 years in the making before Brian Wilson released his version of it in 2004. After making Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys embarked on making what was supposed to be their definitive concept album. However, it was never released: Brian Wilson’s mental health was deteriorating while the album was in progress, so the band scrapped it and released an altered version of it called Smiley Smile.

Smile became a thing of rock legend as the most famous unreleased album of all time. But for Brian Wilson, it was a source of shame and a painful reminder that drugs and mental ill health prevented him from releasing what was supposed to be their magnum opus. Wilson managed to start playing live versions of the album with a new band, despite previously having been so broken up about it that he couldn’t even talk about the songs. After that, he was ready to record it. He recorded it without the rest of the Beach Boys with a different 10-piece band and was finally ready to put it out to the world.

As opposed to the earlier Beach Boys work which was primarily focused around girls in bikinis, surfing, fast cars and young love, Smile has a degree of sophistication to it where I feel like I can’t get the full extent of it on the first time of listening to it. It’s not that it’s particularly inaccessible, but there are just so many layers to it. Wilson described it in the ä60s as a “teenage symphony to God.”

I’ve always found it interesting that Brian Wilson made so many songs about the beach, surfing, girls and getting into trouble with your friends, when he disliked the beach, didn’t surf and lived under a tyrant of a father so probably didn’t get into that much trouble. It’s like he was writing about a life that he didn’t have. I can understand why this record brought him so much mental trouble, as it’s like a genuine peek into his head. One of his band members said that he was afraid Brian would die if they released it and it flopped, and I can see why: there wasn’t the usual artistic distance to where he ended and the music began. Smile was all him.

The album is an 8.5/10 now, but I’ll need to dig deeper into it. I’m pretty sure I’ll get something more out of it the next time I listen to it.