Brian Wilson Presents Smile (also referred to as Smile or the abbreviation BWPS) is the fifth studio album by American musician Brian Wilson, released on September 28, 2004 by Nonesuch. It features all-new recordings of music that he had originally created for Smile, an unfinished concept album he produced for the Beach Boys and abandoned in 1967. Revisiting the project was an intense emotional undertaking for Wilson, who had long associated it with trauma and personal failure.
Wilson initially agreed to revisit Smile in the form of a live concert performance, commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall in London, as a follow-up to his 2000–2002 tour for the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. From October to November 2003, he worked with keyboardist Darian Sahanaja and original lyricist Van Dyke Parks in assembling a three-movement structure embellished with newly written lyrics, melodies, and orchestrations. The concert premiered on February 20, 2004 with five repeated sold-out showings. Encouraged by the positive reception, Wilson produced its studio-recorded adaptation and embarked on a world tour lasting from late 2004 to mid-2005. His former Beach Boys bandmates were not involved with BWPS, nor with the Showtime documentary that accompanied its release, Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile, directed by biographer David Leaf.
BWPS was universally acclaimed by critics and peaked at number 13 in the U.S. and number 7 in the UK. It earned Wilson his first Grammy Award, winning in the category of Best Rock Instrumental Performance for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow". The album also garnered a nomination for best engineering for Mark Linett who recorded and mixed the project. In 2011, the album's sequencing served as a blueprint for The Smile Sessions, a compilation dedicated to the original Beach Boys recordings, with Wilson and Linett among the co-producers. In 2020, BWPS was ranked number 399 on Rolling Stones list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". , it is the third-highest rated album on Metacritic.
Background Brian Wilson abandoned Smile in mid-1967 amid difficulties during its production with the Beach Boys and lyricist Van Dyke Parks. The band substituted its release with Smiley Smile, a downscaled version, and a legend subsequently grew around the original project. During the 1980s, unreleased material from its recording sessions circulated on bootlegs, leading many fans to compile a hypothetical version of the completed album. Among these fans were Los Angeles musicians Darian Sahanaja, Probyn Gregory, and Nick Walusko, later members of the band Wondermints and contributors to journalist Domenic Priore's Smile-focused fanzine, The Dumb Angel Gazette.
In 1995, Wilson reteamed with Parks for the collaborative album Orange Crate Art, provoking speculation of an imminent Smile release, however, Wilson indicated a greater interest in completing a then-forthcoming collaboration with musician Andy Paley. That year, Paley invited Wilson to a concert at the Morgan-Wixon Theater in Los Angeles, a show which featured the Wondermints performing "Surf's Up". After the concert, Wilson remarked to Paley, "If I'd had these guys back in '67, I could've taken Smile on the road." In late 1998, the Wondermints, at the invitation of Wilson's wife and then-manager Melinda Ledbetter, joined his newly formed touring band, a group that included guitarist Jeffrey Foskett, multi-instrumentalist Scott Bennett, reed player Paul Mertens, bassist Bob Lizik, and backing vocalist Taylor Mills. A successful initial tour was followed with concert performances of the full Pet Sounds album from 2000 to 2002; for shows with a symphonic orchestra, Parks was commissioned to write an orchestral arrangement of Wilson's songs as an opener.
Wilson had long been psychologically scarred by the Smile sessions and associated the album with personal failure. Sahanaja recalled, "When I first met Brian, you couldn't even mention the words 'Heroes and Villains'; he'd turn around and walk away or he'd say, 'I don't want to talk about it.'" In 2000, while at a private Christmas gathering at Bennett's house, a request from the wife of biographer and filmmaker David Leaf prompted Wilson to play the song on piano, to the astonishment of everybody present. Sahanaja later said, "If you had even mentioned it to him a month earlier, he would have freaked." Wilson subsequently agreed to perform the song at a forthcoming tribute show held in his honor at the Radio City Music Hall in New York. At that event, various artists performed his songs, including "Our Prayer" and "Surf's Up", with his band providing accompaniment. A performance of "Cabinessence" was considered but abandoned due to its complexity. Following the concert, Ledbetter and Sahanaja successfully petitioned Wilson to add "Our Prayer" and "Surf's Up" into his regular setlists. "Heroes and Villains" and a medley of "Wonderful" and "Cabinessence" were also added. Within a few months, he performed "Our Prayer" and "Heroes and Villains" during an appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
During rehearsals for the Pet Sounds concerts in January 2002, Wilson met with Sahanaja, Ledbetter, and concert promoter Glenn Max. There, Max discussed with the band what could logically follow, concluding that performing Smile was the only way to top the success of Pet Sounds. The idea of performing material from Smile was raised without Wilson objecting, and the Royal Festival Hall, through its programming mandate and budget, ultimately commissioned the project. In 2003, during the recording of his forthcoming album Gettin' in over My Head, Wilson permitted his managers, Ronnie Lippin and Jean Sievers, to schedule shows that would include the live debut of Smile. On May 22, while in London to accept an Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, it was announced that Wilson and his band would perform a live interpretation of Smile in February 2004 at the Royal Festival Hall. Parks, who had attended the Radio City Music Hall concert, was not originally contacted about the planned concerts and learned of them through the press.
The announcement generated mixed reactions from some fans concerned that Wilson's attempt to complete Smile would diminish its legacy, a sentiment Sahanaja initially shared. He remembered that during their meetings over the summer, Wilson did not appear interested in the project, although he gradually became more engaged. That same period, Wilson told Leaf that he could not proceed with the Smile concerts without Leaf's continuous presence. Leaf, who had recently completed a film about the Bee Gees, proposed that his daily involvement would only be possible if they were making a documentary film, a condition Wilson accepted.
Collaboration and assembly
The project was not initially approached as a completion of the original Smile album, but rather as an effort to compile previously released material into a coherent live performance. To facilitate this, Sahanaja assumed the role of Wilson's "musical secretary" and, in late 2003, transferred selected recordings from the Beach Boys' tape vaults to a laptop computer. His preparatory work also involved consulting bootleg recordings he had collected since the early 1980s, as well as an archive of literature belonging to Leaf, which included photocopies of handwritten lyric sheets that were originally given to illustrator Frank Holmes in 1966.
Using Pro Tools session files loaded onto his Apple G3 iBook, Sahanaja subsequently joined Wilson at his home to review the recordings and determine their original intended structure. Sahanaja undertook the task of transcribing and deconstructing the music, presenting his reconstructions to Wilson for feedback and revision. This process began with the isolation of recurring musical motifs and chord progressions before progressing to lyrical content. Wilson had resisted listening to the original recordings and later said that they had "reawakened the bad feelings of the drugs, not the music. The music was good vibes. The drugs were bad vibes. I had a bad flashback, but we got over it right away."
Early in these sessions, the pair were working on "Do You Like Worms?" when they ran into issues reading the handwriting of its lyric sheet. Wilson swiftly phoned Parks, who he had not spoken to in years, and immediately asked what word came after "cheering". Parks requested a lyric sheet to be faxed, and within minutes, called back and clarified that the word was "Indians". After Wilson and Sahanaja finished their work for that day, Wilson called Parks again and had a lengthier conversation, during which Parks accepted the invitation to join the project.
Parks assumed his original role, providing lyrics that had been written in the 1960s but not previously documented, and some that were newly written for the project, though he was not involved with track sequencing, preferring to leave those decisions to Wilson. In the interest of preserving the "integrity" of their work, Sahanaja took on a less active role, contributing to the discussions only when the songwriters were struggling with "how to pull something off live".
Original Smile differences Wilson stated that he could recall little of Smile until Parks entered the project, while Parks himself had not listened to the original recordings in decades. According to Wilson, BWPS reimagined the original Smile concept "from scratch" and became "different, much different. Much more progressive, much happier, much more uplifting." Parks believed that a hypothetical 1967 version of Smile would not have significantly diverged from their 2004 arrangement, and when asked by Sahanaja if an idea was part of the original concept, would only respond with, "It was inevitable." Sahanaja recounted two exceptions in which Wilson clearly recalled ideas that he had originally conceived for the album: one was the verse melody of "Do You Like Worms?"; the other was the pairing of "Wonderful" and "Look". Regarding the latter, Sahanaja said that "Brian just butted those two together and said, 'Yeah, that's it! That's how it goes!'" Elaborating on Wilson and Parks' communication during the writing sessions, Sahanaja said:
A number of short, orchestral segues between songs were newly written for the project by Wilson, Parks, Sahanaja, and Paul Mertens; they also wrote a string arrangement for the second part of "Surf's Up", an idea Wilson stated was originally intended for the piece. According to Mertens, some orchestral parts were transcribed from existing recordings, while others were newly added; he recalled instances where he proposed ideas not present on the original recordings with Wilson's approval. Some song titles were changed; "Do You Like Worms?" was renamed "Roll Plymouth Rock", an alteration Wilson attributed to a desire for "something a little more appropriate". When presented with "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow", he hummed the melody from the Smiley Smile track "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter", which was then incorporated into the composition.