page_title: The Smile Sessions
section_title: Reconstruction
hierarchical_section_title: The Smile Sessions / Reconstruction
caption_attribution_description: English: The Beach Boys performing in 1971 at Central Park
context_page_description: The Smile Sessions is a compilation album and box set recorded by American rock band the Beach Boys, released on October 31, 2011 by Capitol Records. The set focuses on abandoned recording sessions from their unfinished 1966–67 album Smile which would have followed the group's 11th studio album Pet Sounds. It features comprehensive session highlights and outtakes, and the first 19 tracks comprise an approximation of what the completed album might have sounded like.
  The compilation is the first and only package devoted to the 1960s Smile recordings originally produced by Brian Wilson, arriving after decades of public anticipation and numerous false starts. The project was led primarily by audio engineers Alan Boyd, Mark Linett, and Capitol A&R director Dennis Wolfe, with Wilson acting as a remote supervisor, assisting the engineers with some mixing decisions. Previously, Wilson had completed a solo album based on Smile in 2004, which Boyd, Linett, and Wolfe used as a blueprint for The Smile Sessions. Wilson later stated that, while the compilation is "not a far cry" from his original vision, he prefers his 2004 version. It is preceded by the similar box set The Pet Sounds Sessions.
context_section_description: The first nineteen tracks of The Smile Sessions assembles the Smile album as it may have sounded in the 1960s while loosely following the template spelled by Brian Wilson's 2004 interpretation. Wilson himself made a few suggestions to the compilation's sequencing after it was presented to him by the compilers Mark Linett, Alan Boyd and Dennis Wolfe. Brian has stated that the exact running order was not decided in 1967 and that the original Smile would have been "less uplifting" than his 2004 version. Although the track listing to The Smile Sessions is different from what it would have been on the original 1967 Smile album, interviews with Linett clarified that the track listing would "present the whole piece as close to it as was envisioned, or as is envisioned, as possible ... with input from Brian as from everybody else".
  When asked whether Linett and Boyd had arrived at what he had envisioned during the 1960s, Brian responded: "Somewhat, yeah. To some degree. It's not a far cry from what I thought it would be." He added that he preferred his 2004 version, and that the sound of The Smile Sessions disappointed him because of its unfinished state. Linett argued that The Smile Sessions may be more accurate to Brian's vision than if he had completed the album in 1967, surmising that "he would have been happier if he had had a bigger canvas to present this," referencing the overwhelming amount of material that would have had to have been condensed into a two-sided vinyl LP, and Brian's ambition to "expand the boundaries of what a pop record was beyond what anybody was doing at the time."
caption: In the 1970s, the Beach Boys attempted to manipulate Brian's prerecorded demo vocals onto Smile backing tracks, but were unsuccessful due to the lack of software samplers.[12]
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2015:05:12 13:22:05", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9787", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "966", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "779"}