The Legacy of Brian Wilson's Smile Album

The family of Brian Wilson, the co-founder of the Beach Boys, announced on June 11 that he passed away at the age of 82. Wilson shaped the Beach Boys’ timeless sound as the band’s songwriter and co-lead vocalist, from the easygoing surf songs of their early days to the more experimental and still influential 1966 album Pet Sounds.

Wilson’s struggles with mental health issues played a role in the followup to Pet Sounds—the unfinished album Smile, which the Beach Boys began recording in 1966. Wilson was convinced it would be his masterpiece, but Smile wouldn’t be released until nearly forty years later.

Here’s the complicated backstory behind Smile—and how it cemented Wilson’s legacy. 

Smile’s not-so-good vibrations

In describing the followup to Pet Sounds, Wilson billed Smile as a “teenage symphony to God.” He was experimenting with songs like “Brian Falls Into a Microphone,” “Love To Say Dada,” and “Do You Like Worms.”

As part of the brainstorming process, Wilson became reclusive, ordering eight truckloads of beach dumped around his piano at home so that he could wiggle his toes in it and get in the zone to compose, according to the New York Times. A lot of mystery came to surround the project, and it only grew when Wilson cancelled the album release in 1967. The Times wrote that it “turned into the most famous unheard album in pop history.”

Later in 1967, the Beach Boys released a stripped down version of Smile, titled Smiley Smile. The band came “nearly undone” by that album, wrote TIME’s Jay Cocks in 1993, and marked the beginning of a decline in their commercial success.

Reaction to Smile

But the Smile sessions weren’t totally for nothing. Over the years, some of the work that Wilson did for Smile ended up in Beach Boy hits like “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains,” “Surf’s Up,” “Cabin Essence” and “Wind Chimes.” Pieces of the unfinished work drew acclaim. Writing about a Good Vibrations box set that included some of Wilson’s recordings for Smile, Cocks described the works as “unfinished, incomplete and glorious. The music is mystic, mad, wild and gentle, quite unlike anything anyone, including Wilson, had ever tried in pop before.”

“The lyrics were as fleeting as a waking dream; the musical tracks were layered as if Wilson were a kid in his room stacking 45-r.p.m. records on top of one another,” he wrote. “The songs that resulted seem random at first, off-beam and crazy, but they haunt.”

TIME’s Bruce Handy also wrote about the joys of discovering a CD of unfinished Smile tracks: “I love this CD. I love its raw beauty, but even more, I love its wasted promise. (This is a boy example; girls can substitute Sylvia Plath‘s burned journals.) I also love the illicit access to Wilson’s half-finished thoughts, to Wilson himself.”

Wilson finished Smile in 2004, and it was “rapturously received,” as TIME noted in a 2008 list naming it one of the 10 best comeback albums. 

“It was finally ready to be finished, ready to be accepted,” he told the New York Times that year. Wilson argued that the mid-1960s wasn’t the right time to release it, explaining, “We think people are now ready to understand where it was coming from. Back then, no one was ready for it.”