Smile (2004)

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 Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". As of 2025, 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.