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Brian Wilson: Smile

Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 19 September 2004

The piano in the sand pit, the orchestra decked out in fireman's helmets, the kilos of grade A hashish, the master tapes that were destroyed, or locked in a vault, the breakdown and the years of silence and self-enforced seclusion. Was there ever an album so surrounded by myth, so weighed down by anecdote and legend, so inflated by its own absence, as Smile?

Total word count of piece: 455

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