Yes, it’s yet another take on the Beach Boys’ ill-fated 1967 Smile album.
Back on June 5, 2026, I posted this on the book of faces:
I’m embarking on a ridiculous new project, strictly for shits and giggles. There are a million different recreations of the Beach Boys’ Smile album, and I’ve decided to make another one, tentatively titled The Worst Version Of Smile Ever. Calling it that takes the pressure off.
My intention here is to break all rules of “1967 accuracy” or “staying true to Brian and Van’s constantly shifting amorphous concept” and just trying to do things that sound cool to me, which includes borrowing heavily from the underrated Smiley Smile and many of the revisions that have come before, especially Roberto Villarcabral’s, which is my current favorite. I’m starting by tinkering with Good Vibrations, which is already perfect, but some parts of it have always bugged me, and I’m jumping right in and making a mess of it, ha ha!
The great Santa Cruz artist Dag Weiser immediately jumped in and asked to do the cover art in an old school cut-and-paste punk rock Xerox collage style. Dag also gave the album its final title. A FROWN IS JUST A SMILE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN.
1, GOOD VIBRATIONS (IT’S WEIRD)
One of the most perfect singles of the mid-60s, and yet… Why is the “I don’t know where but she sends me there” bridge so short? I doubled it, adding some some Brian vocals from the original rejected Pet Sounds demo and found a good use for some interesting Tony Asher lyrics, expanding the “sudden switch to the quiet part” section too without going too overboard on the hum-dee-dah stuff. The theremin outro fades out too fast for my liking as well, so I fixed that too.
2. DO YOU DIG WORMS?
Come on, hasn’t this been a missed opportunity for a silly pun for years? Of course the title, altered or not, has absolutely nothing to do with the actual song, reconstituted here from several other versions. Now the epic of manifest destiny ends with the protagonist building a little pad in his ultimate destination, and the story finally feels complete.
3. HUNGRY IN THE BARNYARD
Smile is such a mess of fragments that have never been resolved. The 2002 version frankly feels far too pat for me; it needs to be weirder. What was Barnyard supposed to be anyway? To these ears, it fits perfectly with Mike Love’s main contribution to Smiley Smile that most fans want to forget about; I say, embrace it! I’ve always speculated that if Brian had given Mike a showcase here and there in the twists and turns of Smile, he might not have been such an obstructive jerk about the whole project. So in this reimagining, things are humming along on the farm, but one particularly hormonal farmhand is unhappy because he isn’t getting his primal needs met. So when work is done, our boy heads off to find some companionship in town. We also get the first dose here of Mike Love’s unique tenor sax stylings as he calls out for his kind of woman, which leads to one of my favorite rejected parts of Good Vibrations, where the Wrecking Crew sound like they’re auditioning for Stevie Wonder’s next hit single. We wind down with the instrumental bit of I Wanna Be Around and the workshop bits. Lust lasts only so long, then you have to decide whether you’re ready to commit and work.
4. BALD MASTER SUNSHINE
She’s Goin’ Bald on Smiley Smile feels like Mike Love’s attempt to salvage a leftover Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks fragment and turn it into something amusing. I toyed with using more, but in the end I just kept the chipmunk section and plunged into the original rejected Smile song, which sounds like the missing piece of a trilogy with The Old Master Painter and You (Were) My Sunshine. Several other versions tacked on this plaintive outro that may have been part of Heroes And Villains, but no, I agree this is where it belongs, and so it is, baby.
5. ONE ONE WONDERFUL
Several songs on Smile were completely remade on Smiley Smile. Some of them, in my view, were vastly improved. Wonderful always stood out for me, with Carl Wilson’s breathless, stoned vocal and the eerie piano/organ backing. When I heard the Brian-sung Smile version, it felt very different. How do you incorporate the best of both versions, when they’re both in different keys? In this case, putting the Smiley vocal over the Smile backing (and doing the exact opposite on the extra verse Carl didn’t sing on the remake) makes total sense, and doesn’t even sound out of tune; instead it seems to fit in with the complex Wilson counterpoint harmony style. Now we have the complete story of an innocent girl who ventures out into the world, loses her virginity, nothing bad happens to her, and she comes back home perfectly happy and unscathed with even her religious convictions intact. “That’s not me,” she thinks…or is it?
6. OUR SHUT DOWN PRAYER
The yin and yang of Beachboyism must be grappled with and enjoyed. Five, four, three, two, blow that horn. Now let the angels pray. After the prayer, we get a little preview of Dennis Wilson’s buried truck drivin’ man descant from the next song.
7. CABINESSENCE (HOME ON A SLIGHTLY WIDER RANGE)
This is already a goddamn masterpiece, and there is plenty room for more of it. I pieced together bits from other Smile remakes, including some tasty instrumental and vocal dubs. Somebody even threw in some actual crows, which bookend it nicely. I boosted the truck drivin’ Dennis bit on the second chorus, which adds some scrambled complexity to the voices. Mike pitched a fit over the lines he had to sing, but he did his job well, and those falsetto scale-singing voices make me see Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows in my mind.
8. HEROES AND VILLAINS (EPIC BUT NOT TOO EPIC)
In what universe could this ever have been a hit single, even in 1967? Really, it’s a cubist pop art audio collage like the early Mothers Of Invention without the misanthropic streak (one of my favorite stories in David Leaf’s book on Smile describes Brian and Frank Zappa hanging out during a break from their respective intense recording sessions—one can imagine them comparing their new songs about vegetables) all wrapped up in a silly Western potboiler like Marty Robbins’ El Paso reinterpreted as slapstick. I’m not the first to realize that the supposed prologue to Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow is better used not as fire engines but Keystone Kops mayhem following the “You’re under arrest!” outburst. There are versions of H&V that go on forever; this one I think is just enough.
9. VEGETABLES (RED AS A BEET AND LAUGHING)
The Smiley Smile version of Vegetables was one of the first psychedelic Brian Wilson songs other than the ubiquitous Good Vibrations that blew my mind on FM radio. The Smile version has its own charms (and a hilarious extra verse) but that sloppy instrumental intro has always annoyed me; give me that simple bass pulse any day. This was a case where the difference in keys between each version could only be resolved with some pitch shifting, which made the candy bar verse sound extra goofy. (I couldn’t make it fit after the “chomp chomp doodly” key change transition.) After that section, the versions are in the same key and overlap a bit, so we could close with the bit that became “Mama Says.”
10. TANGLED WIND CHIMES
Now I could have left well enough alone and just used the entire Smiley Smile version of Wind Chimes (which is the definitive version as far as I’m concerned), but instead I chose to drive myself crazy by fusing the loose hash-fueled Smiley vocals with the tinkly exotica of the Smile backing track along with Brian’s earnest original vocals. The fact that they were in different keys didn’t seem to matter, and the results remind me a bit of the Residents.
11. WHEN BY FIRE
In response to my original Facebook post, I received one comment from Jon Hunt: “Have Mike saying ‘WHEEEEEEEEEEN’ from the beginning of the live Be True to Your School start every song.” Great idea, but maybe not for every song. I collaged some of the most annoying “whens” I found on YouTube and went from there to the scary chaos of the Fire sessions (minus the aforementioned Keystone Kops nonsense). We gradually melt into the tamed Smiley version, Fall Breaks And Back To Winter, as the fire dies down, observing no tempo or time. Fire doesn’t recognize the rules of Western music; it just burns.
12. I LOVE TO STAY COOL
I Love To Say Dada/Cool Cool Water/In Blue Hawaii gets turned into an extended mood-swinging plunge. Everything from the tortured intro on the 2002 Smile interpretation (craggy old Brian and all) to Sunflower’s mellow 70s take Cool Cool Water to someone’s ethically questionable AI tinkering that hilariously puts Van Dyke Parks’ lyrics in Mike Love’s voice. I actually have always loved the “in an ocean or in a glass” bit and you bet I included that. The Child Is The Father Of the Man not-quite-a-song is put to use here, and we even have some pieces of Love and Jardine’s actually-pretty-sublime eco-protest lament Don’t Go Near The Water for good measure.
13. SURF’S UP (EXTENDED TIDAL WAVE MIX)
In the 70s, Carl Wilson wrenched a godlike masterpiece from the ashes of his brother’s project and added a few cool elements of his own, including a gorgeous lead vocal on the first movement and the coda. It wasn’t what Brian intended, but I don’t think it can be topped. A few more instrumental sections to let it breathe, some extra harmonies someone found (or concocted?) on the “Come about hard” verse, and we have a nice alternative version to a song that didn’t need one, but why say no to a couple more minutes of Surf’s Up?
14. WHISTLE INFINITE
The final song on Smiley Smile wasn’t on Smile at all, and it was only about a minute long, but it’s so perfect it deserves to be infinitely longer. Here. we settle for just five and a half minutes. Whistle in!