Брайан Уилсонның «Smile» альбомының жаңа нұсқасы

2004 studio album by Brian Wilson
the rerecorded 2004 version of Smile

Brian Wilson Presents Smile (also referred to as Smile or the abbreviation BWPS) That year, Paley invited Wilson to a concert at the Morgan Wixon Theater in Los Angeles, a show which featured the Wondermints performing a rendition of "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 accepted an offer from Wilson's wife Melinda Ledbetter to join Wilson's live band, a group that included guitarist Jeffrey Foskett, multi instrumentalist Scott Bennett, reed player Paul Mertens, bassist Bob Lizik, and backing vocalist Taylor Mills. Their first tour was successful, and from 2000 to 2002, Wilson followed up with another, this time playing the Pet Sounds album in its entirety.

Wilson had been psychologically scarred by the making of Smile and regarded the album as his life's greatest failure. In December 2000, while at a Christmas party at Bennett's house, Wilson was playing songs on piano when the wife of biographer David Leaf called out a request for "Heroes and Villains". To the astonishment of everyone present, Wilson began playing and singing the song. He then agreed to perform the song with his band at a forthcoming tribute show held in his honor at the Radio City Music Hall in New York. At the concert, various artists performed renditions of Wilson's songs, including "Our Prayer" and "Surf's Up", with Wilson's band providing accompaniment. A performance of "Cabinessence" was considered, but dropped 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. Parks, who had attended the Radio City Music Hall concert, was not originally involved, nor was he contacted about the project beforehand, and only learned about it through the press. The news elicited some mixed reactions from fans of Wilson who felt that his attempt to complete Smile would destroy the legendary quality associated with the project. Sahanaja remembered that, during their meetings over the summer, Wilson did not appear interested in the project. He said, "I knew there were a lot of people who were very familiar with this stuff, and for most of them even touching Smile was sacrilege. I was of that same mindset, but then Brian gradually started getting into it."

The project was not approached as an attempt to complete Smile. In Sahanaja's recollection, "He'd be saying, 'Oh yeah, that's supposed to be a part of this song,' or 'Use that bit to connect these two songs here,' and it was really neat." However, on another occasion, Sahanaja said that Wilson did not assert his original ideas for the album: "Brian Wilson is not going to tell you in October/November of 2003, 'No, this was supposed to be like this.' If anything, he was terrified at first, but as he became more comfortable, we just went with his gut. And nine times out of ten, his gut is Smile." Early in these sessions, the pair were working on the song "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 asked Wilson to fax him the lyric sheet, and within minutes, Parks 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 returned to his original role as the project's lyricist. He was not involved with the sequencing of the tracks, 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". Rehearsals began in January 2004, at which point Leaf had arrived with a film crew set on documenting the project. Wilson was still intensely troubled by his memories of Smile and the prospects of performing it live. He began struggling with a resurgence of auditory hallucinations. Sahanaja recalled that, after the holiday break, when he returned to Wilson's house to prepare for the forthcoming vocal rehearsals, "I remember him shaking and he sat down and he started crying and yelling 'I'm fucked! I'm fucked!'" When Smile completed its debut, Wilson received a ten minute standing ovation before he was able to invite Parks, who was in tears, onstage. The concerts were repeated at the same venue for every night until February 26, with each playing recorded by engineer Mark Linett for posterity on film and a 48 track Genex hard disk recorder. All the dates were sold out, with attendees including Paul McCartney, George Martin, and Jason Pierce of Spiritualized. John Mulvey wrote in NME; "It's rare that you can honestly say you were present at a moment of genuine historic significance. And it's rarer still that the reality of these occasions measures up to the hype." In March, GQ ranked BWPS among the "Top Five Gigs of All Time". Mojos Jim Irvin was similarly underwhelmed; although he enjoyed the songs, he wrote, "To claim that this show was transcendent is to disregard the figure at its heart, a bewildered looking man of 61 who barely plays the piano he's perched behind. [ ] its hard to feel uplifted, as such." Critic Barney Hoskyns wrote that it was "a pretty magnificent evening", although Wilson's apathetic demeanor resembled that of an autistic person's. Hoskyns mused, "As bizarrely not there as Brian seemed through all of this, he seemed to be enjoying himself as much as he is able to. Occasionally he flapped his arms about, and he made a big point of introducing 'Marcella' as a real 'rock'n'roll' song – as though that were what we secretly craved." Recording began on April 13, 2004 with his ten piece touring band, augmented by a ten piece string section and an acoustic bassist. The basic tracks were recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders in four days, with overdubbing and mixing continuing until July with some stops at engineer Mark Linett's Your Place or Mine studio. On October 5, Leaf's documentary Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile premiered on the Showtime network. The film included interviews with Wilson and dozens of his associates, albeit none of his surviving bandmates from the Beach Boys, who declined to appear in the film. It was certified platinum in combination with its international sales. From autumn 2004 to summer 2005, Wilson supported the album with a world tour that included stops in the US, Europe, and Japan. In March 2005, Wilson, Parks, and Leaf held a panel at the annual South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas to discuss Smile. Asked if he would permit the release of the original Beach Boys recordings, Wilson responded: "Never. Those are gone forever. I don't want those made public because they bring up bad memories. I don't think about the old days anymore. I never do." Sahanaja told Australian Musician, "In six years of touring this is the happiest we've ever seen Brian, I mean consistently happy and it's got to be because of the music. [ ] Who would have thought of all things Smile."

BWPS received widespread acclaim from music critics. A+ grade. It also topped his annual list of the year's best album. Dominique Leone of Pitchfork declared, "As the mythical follow up to Pet Sounds, it delivers, and despite his age, Wilson's voice even sounds fantastic, still carrying the weight of these angelic melodies." In Britain, The Guardians Alexis Petridis wrote that news of the album's release caused "an outbreak of mild hysteria" and provoked a journalist from the newspaper to solicit an opinion from the British government, who then supplied a comment from defense secretary Geoff Hoon. Less favorably, music critic Paul Morley felt that BWPS represented "a breathtaking example of ultimately banal thinkers attempting self consciously to make art, a square version of freaking out, musically sophisticated, aesthetically conservative [ ] I needed a quick shower of Ramones, Dre and Hendrix afterwards, just to rinse away the clingy bits of fake myth." John Bush of AllMusic believed BWPS was "a remarkably unified, irresistible piece of pop music", yet decreed that it was "no musical watershed on par with Sgt. Pepper's [ ] or Wilson's masterpiece, Pet Sounds". It won one Grammy, in the category of Best Rock Instrumental Performance for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow". Smile also finished in second place in the Pazz & Jop, an annual critics poll run by The Village Voice. Pitchfork named it fifth best album of 2004 and the 25th best album released between 2000 and 2004.

Mike Love gave his thoughts on the album in a November 2004 interview: "I guess it's a good thing for Brian to do. A friend sent me a copy, but I haven't had time to hear it yet because we've been on tour." In an earlier interview, he had said he would have no interest in listening to the album and, citing the legal concept of "corporate opportunity", mentioned that it had possibly infringed on the Beach Boys' intellectual property rights. Love argued that, because the group had collectively paid for the 1960s recording sessions and all contributed work on the original tracks, "I would have thought it would have been more honorable to put it together as the Beach Boys." In many interviews he gave around the album's release, Wilson disparaged the Beach Boys, calling them inferior to his current band. In a 2007 interview, Love expressed that he was disappointed to hear about Wilson's remarks. "I'm glad that he's happy with the people he's performing with, but, you know, I think it's sad that he thinks that. My personal feeling is that the original group recordings on Smile have got to be better." Bruce Johnston took offense as well, writing in an email to biographer Peter Ames Carlin: "I spent years showing full support for Brian, but now that's all changed because of his current point of view." Johnston said of the album in a 2008 interview, "I think as an exercise in keeping [Wilson] occupied, it's interesting. [ ] I talk to him every once in a while. But I'm never going to tell him that I'll take Pet Sounds over what he's doing now." One of the promotions for the album was a free CD issued through the Mail on Sunday in September 2004. The 10 track compilation included Beach Boys songs Wilson had recently rerecorded, five of which he coauthored with Love. The Mail on Sunday distributed 2.6 million copies of the compilation. In November 2005, Love filed a lawsuit in which he claimed the promotion hurt the sales of the original recordings. Love's suit was dismissed in 2007 when a judge determined that there were "no triable issues of material fact". Al Jardine said in 2013 that he "didn't give it a whole lot of thought; I didn't want to go there at that time. They were good enough to send me a copy. So I dropped the needle, as they used to say, and listened to a few cuts, and it was very nice. But there's nothin' like the [vintage recordings]."

Although critics widely referred to Wilson's 2004 version as the Smile album completed, many fans disputed the notion. Bootleggers continued to compile their own versions of the Beach Boys' album. In 2011, The Smile Sessions was released containing an approximation of what the band's finished album might have sounded like, using BWPS as a blueprint. Linett co produced the compilation with Wilson. According to Sahanaja, Wilson "lobbied hard" for the album's sequence to be based on BWPS. In a 2015 interview, Wilson stated that he ultimately preferred his solo version. Reviewing BWPS on the tenth anniversary of its release, Chris Shields of the St. Cloud Times wrote that "the sequencing raised a question mark or two, and there were mixing quibbles (I would have loved to hear more bass), but [ ] [t]he lyrical beauty, the majesty of the music, the shifting (yet somehow fixed) meanings that intertwine throughout it all, still elate me, still fill me with hope and joy." PopMatters contributor Sean Murphy opined that the album was "crucial", but rendered "less significant" with the availability of The Smile Sessions. Writing for NewMusicBox, Frank Oteri called BWPS "a wonderful album, but it is also not quite right. It is not and can never be a substitute for SMiLE". In 2010, it was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2020, it was ranked number 399 on Rolling Stones list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The editors wrote, "Close your eyes and you can imagine how it might've changed the world in 1968 , but with Wilson's influence still all over scads of indie bands in 2004, it sounds and feels majestically modern." In 2022, it was ranked number 102 on Uncuts list of the greatest albums released since 1997, as well as number 21 on Rolling Stones list of the greatest concept albums in history.