The 10 Out of 10 Beach Boys Album Brian Wilson Wanted To Be Remembered For—and It Wasn’t ‘Pet Sounds’

When you’re making music that no one else is making, you don’t have source material to reference. Musical experimentalists are left to hope the sound they are envisioning works out in the end. That payoff isn’t guaranteed to come immediately. For some artists, like Brian Wilson, it can take many albums and many years.

Videos by American Songwriter

All Wilson fans have their opinion on which album is his best work. For many, the answer is the era-defining Pet Sounds. However, another album in The Beach Boys sphere stood out for Wilson himself. Find out which album that is, below.

The Album Brian Wilson Wanted to Be Remembered For: “More Adventurous”

How do you follow up an album as significant as Pet Sounds? From the outside looking in, that seems an impossible task. According to Wilson and his insider’s perspective, it basically was. Yes, Wilson struggled to finish Smile, the originally conceived follow up to Pet Sounds. Many ideas were swirling around in Wilson’s head, but he just couldn’t seem to actually get them down in the studio.

It took many years for this album to be released in its entirety. Luckily, it was worth the wait. Though Smile may not have the recognizable hits that Pet Sounds earned the band, it has the same genius production.

Rating Smile

Wilson once went on record calling Smile the album he wants to be remembered for. He put it leagues above Pet Sounds in a 1-10 scale, shocking fans with this unique take.

“Pet Sounds everybody liked, of couse, but if you had to put it on a scale out to ten, I’d give Pet Sounds a four and I’d give SMiLE a ten,” Wilson once said. “That how much I rate it. There’s more to it. There’s more exploration. More adventurous. More rock opera-ish. It was an unfinished work of art. ‘We junked it’ was the whole thing. [Then] we finished all the songs, and it was sequenced all together which was a plus for us.”

We can’t deny that Pet Sounds proved to be a more iconic album that Smile. That fact could be down to timing though. Pet Sounds has had a longer lifespan to earn notoriety. We will give it a few more decades to see if Smile manages to catch up. Revisit the sounds of this album, below.

(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)