(Credits: Far Out / Brian Wilson)
Wed 17 September 2025 21:04, UK
It would be easy for any artist like Brian Wilson to lose count of the classics he put out.
The Beach Boys were a damn hit factory back in the day, but as soon as the band started making a turn towards more adventurous pop music, Wilson figured that there was no room in his life for songs about surfing, cars, and fun in the sun. He wanted to write about deeper topics than the California fantasy, but there are some dreams that he had that he eventually fell out of love with as well.
Then again, most of us would be so lucky to have anything even close to what Wilson did throughout his career. Even though an album like The Beach Boys Love You is insanely flawed from a lyrical standpoint, it’s easy to picture Wilson as this musical lost soul that’s slowly rediscovering the one thing that he was most passionate about for so many years. But there were bound to be some songs that didn’t work the way they should have.
Wilson was often incredibly humble about his gift for melody, but even his throwaway songs were practically on the same level as Mozart. He knew the pop formula to a tee, but even when looking at the greatest moments of Pet Sounds, there are bits of music theory scattered throughout the record that simply shouldn’t work and yet do because of Wilson following the sounds he heard in his head.
But if Pet Sounds was the real watershed moment, Smile was supposed to be the moment where everything he came together. He had created the last record in an attempt to compete with what The Beatles were doing, but after suffering from a mental breakdown in the middle of making the record, he lost the momentum that he had for the project before it was released in pieces on later records.
It looked like Smile was going to be banished to the same musical purgatory where The Who’s Lifehouse exists, but Wilson did at least get to see his musical offspring be brought back from the dead. The Smile Sessions finally gave the world the kind of record that Wilson had always heard in his head from the moment he began working on it, but even after years of it being in the vault, Wilson remembered being completely spent with the entire record by the time it was out.
He was undeniably proud of the work, but he would have gladly gone for months without having to listen to it again, saying, “You know what, I don’t like SMiLE any more. I got so tired of it and did it so many times that I’ve forgotten the damn thing! I said: ‘I don’t want to remember it. It’s done.’ I like the band I played it with.” The whole thing sounds angelic now, but it’s easy to see where Wilson’s coming from.
This is a project that spent decades in the vault, and while fans do now have a high-quality version of the tapes to listen to, most people aren’t going to be experiencing the album in that way. They would have already heard half the tunes anyway, and bringing them out of the vault could have ended up doing a lot more harm than good had Wilson not had a positive reaction to everything.
If we can be objective here for a second, Smile didn’t need to come out because Wilson thought it was a good idea. He was already regarded as a genius by his peers, but putting out a revamped version of the record was a reminder to every kid who thought that The Beach Boys only wrote about surfing. They were as much of a legend as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and it’s albums like this that are the blueprint for how someone can push pop music forward.
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