Tomorrow’s release of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE is for me the most important day in popular music since the release of Tommy.

SMiLE is not a rock ‘n roll album per se. “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations” rock, yes, but this is not a rock album. At the same time, the album doesn’t shun rock. It does something more radical than either shunning or embracing it. SMiLE simply accepts rock as a given and a good, just as it accepts America as one gigantic, inspiring, flawed, wicked, marvelous concept/experience.

And SMiLE goes still farther. It explores the essential connections between comedy and epic and tragedy, between the lyric and the dramatic, between the heroic individual and the heroic community, between the introspective lover and the introspective historian.

This is an extraordinary work.

I’ve heard most of it, in its 66-67 incarnation, through bootlegs and the precious half-hour officially released in the Good Vibrations box set some years back. That music is fragmented, trippy, dreamy, lost in its own sweet poignance yet clear-sighted in its vision of its many subjects. The music on the new CD, which has been completely re-recorded and which I heard courtesy of a friend (thanks, SH), doesn’t have the hash-and-youth sweetness of the original. In its place, the new SMiLE has a certain edge, a welcome ferocity at times, a sense that something urgent must be communicated even as the self communes with itself, all wrapped up in the most beautiful music I can imagine. (Nothing beats “Wonderful” and “Surf’s Up” and “Our Prayer” in my book, and “Wind Chimes” is a very close fourth.)

I don’t know if SMiLE will heal America, as protagonist Ray Shackelford thought it might in the magnificent Lewis Shiner novel-ode entitled Glimpses. But I can tell you that in its singular glory, this album is one of the most splendidly and gorgeously defiant gestures I believe I have ever heard. Thank you, Brian. For everything.

“What I do I am, for that I came,” writes the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Behold an immortal diamond, resurrected, complete: Brian Wilson.

I love you, Brian.