The saga of the best album of 2004 goes back to at least 1966, when Brian Wilson was putting the finishing touches on a Beach Boys album designed to “beat the Beatles” at their own game and transform the teenybopper surfers into the most innovative rock band in the world.
With the release of Pet Sounds, the 23-year-old Wilson achieved that goal, if only for a short time before sinking into a drug- and depression-fueled spiral of odd and obsessive behavior that would estrange him from his band and bury his composing genius.
Both the genius and the weirdness (documented here, here, here, and here) reached new heights during the sessions for “Good Vibrations,” which Wilson worried over too long for it to be included on Pet Sounds. Instead, the “pocket symphony” began to coalesce in Wilson’s mind with other imagined musical plugs and dottles as the basis for a new “teenage symphony to God” entitled Dumb Angel–an idea that would sound utterly ridiculous coming from anyone other than the poster child for arrested development, who had just created “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” and “Good Vibrations.”
Wilson hired semi-famous eccentric Van Dyke Parks to write lyrics, changed the work’s name to Smile, and did some recording, but scrapped the project in the spring of 1967. Later that year, and with minimal input from Wilson, some of what was intended for Smile was released by the Beach Boys on Smiley Smile, to commercial and critical disappointment.
Thirty-seven years later, Wilson ends the speculation over what might have been (though not the bootlegging of original Smile fragments) with the official release of a freshly finished and completely re-recorded work.
Thankfully, and in spite of everything–especially Wilson’s recent track record of mediocre work with depressingly sluggish lead vocals–Smile actually lives up to long-held expectations, Wilson’s potential, and, fittingly, its name.
Sonically, Smile has more going on than Pet Sounds or even Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There are countless instrumental gimmicks, including bells, whistles, mallets, leg-slaps, power drills, and even sounds of carrot and celery bites. There are abrupt shifts of key, tempo, and dynamics. Layer after layer of vocal harmonies–sometimes choral, sometimes doo-wop–soar over horns and strings. But Wilson’s production is never sloppy or confusing, with the work’s 17 tracks and 47 minutes inextricably linked by pure melodic joy.
Parks’s wacky lyrics fit Wilson’s naïve delivery, and, with the help of an old Beach Boys-era tube console, a vocal coach, and, Wilson has admitted, a little ProTools pitch correction here and there, his vocals sound remarkably good.
Indeed, the only thing that could have made Smile more satisfactory would have been hearing the original Beach Boys’ vocals stacked next to Brian’s (especially his late brother Carl’s blissful tenor).
As it stands, Smile towers over the pop landscape of the past few years, and serves as a happy refutation of the old canard that there are no second acts in American life.
–Aaron Keith Harris writes for Country Music Today and Bluegrass Unlimited.