(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 6 January 2026 19:01, UK
For genuine artists, the work is never truly finished upon leaving the studio. While they may emerge with something resembling a completed album, it’s exceedingly rare for the final product heard by fans on vinyl or streaming to perfectly match the vision held in the artist’s mind during its creation. Despite Brian Wilson’s exhaustive efforts in crafting Pet Sounds and achieving stellar results, he eventually regarded the abandoned project Smile as somewhat overrated by fans.
Throughout The Beach Boys’ prime, though, Wilson was already fighting an uphill battle amongst his management and bandmates. Even though he wanted to make the same kind of progressive music that he heard from The Beatles and Bob Dylan, he was always forced back into making the same thing, writing even more songs about cars, surfing, and endless summer beach parties.
Once Pet Sounds rolled around, Wilson would take full control of the studio, letting the rest of the band go on tour without him as he refined the band’s next move. Using the other musicians as instruments by themselves, the album contained some of the most sophisticated takes on pop that the world had ever seen, somehow taking the strangest chords in the world and turning them into pure beauty on ‘God Only Knows’.
The record is now routinely considered one of the best ever made, and for good reason. Sure, it is rich in truly brilliant songs, delivered with inch-perfect precision and has a habit of just genuinely advancing one’s mood away from the doldrums of modernity and toward something far more pleasant. But the main reason it is so beloved is Brian Wilson.
Wilson would bring the album, and all pop music along with it, into a completely new area of the industry. Music had always been about fun and frolics, the laissez-faire attitude that seemed to permeate the world’s pop scene. But Wilson brought a level of expertise to Pert Sounds that made everybody realise this was now getting serious.
The wildly talented Brian Wilson. (Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Although the album didn’t sell out of the gate, Wilson had earned the respect of his peers, with The Beatles crediting the album for inspiring them to make Sgt Pepper. Wilson had made his own masterpiece, and Pet Sounds had secured his legacy. But Smile was destined to go even further, making more extravagant studio experiments spearheaded by the single ‘Good Vibrations’.
The only thing getting in the way was Wilson’s own sanity. After meticulously trying to get the best sounds that he could whenever he walked into the studio, Wilson suffered a near-creative collapse trying to get the album made, leading to most of the sessions sitting on the shelf for years while the band made other projects like Smiley Smile and Surf’s Up.
By the 2000s, Wilson was finally ready to finalise what Smile was supposed to be. Finally, out of Eugene Landy’s control, Wilson had taken time off from music before revisiting the sessions, eventually releasing the album that he should have released back in 1967 all the way in 2004.
Although Wilson was proud to have finally finished the project, he thought that fans were giving far too much praise on the album before it had even come out, writing in I Am Brian Wilson, “People say that Smile is one of the greatest albums ever made. I’m not sure about that. I’m proud of it, but I also think it’s a little overstated, overdone. I think it’s too much music–not too complicated but too rhapsodic, with too many different sections. Still, finishing it was a huge relief”.
While Wilson may have had a few harsh feelings about how the album eventually turned out, the 2010s pop crowd could use the album as a form of musical education, showing what can be done when you make music that’s concerned with sounding great rather than getting on the pop charts. If people were still heaping praise on the album when it was released in 2004, though, there’s a good chance that this kind of musical masterpiece would have melted minds if it had come out after Pet Sounds.
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