![]() Acting as Wilson’s and Parks’s musical secretary, Darian Sahanaja (a member of Wilson’s touring band), began preparing the music for performance. Then, in November 2003, Wilson and Parks got together and listened to the thirty-seven-year-old tapes, following Wilson’s announcement of his intention to complete and perform SMiLE in a series of concerts in London. Bits and pieces of SMiLE have surfaced on subsequent Beach Boys albums a global network of song-swapping fans cobbled together their own wishful-thinking versions of this seemingly lost masterpiece. Until now, SMiLE was, as The New York Times says, “the most famous unheard album in pop history.” The circumstances surrounding its withdrawal have inspired documentary films, book-length investigations, and at least one novel. After Leonard Bernstein heard Wilson perform a solo piano version of “Surf’s Up”-an impressionistic ballad also intended for SMiLE-he deemed the song “an important contribution to 20th century music” and hailed Wilson’s gifts as a composer.īut SMiLE never made its initial release date delays mounted along with the pressure and the project as Wilson had originally envisioned it was finally abandoned. One of the album’s songs, “Good Vibrations”-which Wilson called a “pocket symphony”-became the band’s first million-selling single, topping the charts in both the U.S. ![]() Record jackets and booklets had been printed and ads had been taken out heralding the record’s January 1967 release date. ![]() SMiLE, which was written by Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson in collaboration with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, was intended as the follow-up to the band’s groundbreaking Pet Sounds. SMiLE is produced and arranged by Brian Wilson and features the ten-member band that has supported him on tour over the past five years, augmented by an eight-piece string and horn section. Previous to that, the last new studio recording to reach the top fifteen was the now-legendary Pet Sounds, which was number ten on the chart in May 1966.Īn all-new studio recording of SMiLE-often called the most famous unfinished and unreleased album in pop music history-was released worldwide by Nonesuch Records on September 28, 2004, more than thirty-seven years after its anticipated release date. SMiLE’s number thirteen position on the Billboard chart is the highest for a new Brian Wilson / Beach Boys’ studio recording (non-compilation) since 15 Big Ones reached number eight in July 1976. The record is now enjoying commercial success on a scale last seen by Wilson or the Beach Boys almost thirty years ago. The album has been met with overwhelming critical enthusiasm-it has been called Wilson’s “masterpiece” by Newsweek and received a five-star review from Rolling Stone, among many other accolades. Brian Wilson’s SMiLE debuts this week on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart at number thirteen with more than 65,000 units sold, according to Soundscan.
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