The Smile Sessions

The Smile Sessions is a compilation and box set of the abandoned recordings for Smile, the album Brian Wilson began with Van Dyke Parks in 1966. It is the follow-up to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997). Alan Boyd, Mark Linett and the Capitol A&R director Dennis Wolfe produced it, with Wilson supervising from a distance, and Linett was the engineer. Its first 19 tracks form a hypothetical version of the finished album that follows the template of Wilson's 2004 solo version, Brian Wilson Presents Smile. They are presented in mono. The set was first planned as three CDs and grew to five, two of them devoted to the sessions for Heroes and Villains and Good Vibrations.

It was released on iTunes on 31 October 2011 and on CD and vinyl the next day. It won the Grammy for Best Historical Album in 2013 and ranked number 381 in Rolling Stone's 2012 list of the greatest albums. Mark Richardson of Pitchfork gave it a perfect score, and wrote that the version of the album feels remarkably complete and whole even though it was largely built from unfinished scraps. David Fricke of Rolling Stone wrote that the greatest pop album ever made is still in there somewhere.