Despite crediting production to "the Beach Boys", Wilson actively led the entire project, later referring to it as his second unofficial solo album (the first being 1966's Pet Sounds).

Music fans were generally disappointed that the band twice failed to deliver on the hype surrounding their unreleased album Smile, which was advertised as the follow-up to the sophistication of Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations" (both 1966).

[8] That same month, the group stopped wearing their longtime striped-shirt stage uniforms in favor of matching white, polyester suits that were similar to a Las Vegas show band.

[9][nb 1] Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, and Mike Love were among the many rock musicians who discovered the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi following the Beatles' public endorsement of his Transcendental Meditation technique in August 1967.

[11] In December, the touring group attended a lecture by the Maharishi at a UNICEF Variety Gala in Paris[11] and were moved by the simplicity and effectiveness of his meditation process as a means to obtaining inner peace.

[14] The Beach Boys attended the Maharishi's public appearances in New York[15] and Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which he invited Love to join the Beatles at his training seminar in Rishikesh in northern India.

[17] Friends was recorded primarily at the Beach Boys' private studio, located within Brian's Bel Air home, from late February to early April 1968.

After Love returned from his retreat, they began recording "When a Man Needs a Woman", "Passing By", "Busy Doin' Nothin'", "Wake the World", "Meant for You", "Anna Lee, the Healer", and "Be Still".

[25] In author Jon Stebbins' description, the album "reflects the peaceful and quietly centered aura" that the band had gained from their introduction to Transcendental Meditation.

"[22][nb 4] The few tracks where he served as primary author contained his usual composing trademarks, such as unexpected harmonic changes, descending stepwise progressions, and unusually structured musical phrases.

[3] Biographer Peter Ames Carlin compared the song to a "Unitarian hymn" and interpreted the lyrics to be a description of "the sacred essence of life and the human potential to interact with God.

[48] "Busy Doin' Nothin'" is a flirtation with bossa nova, one of several autobiographic slice-of-life songs written by Brian during this era, and one of the only tracks on the album where he exclusively used session musicians.

[58] Featuring Buffalo Springfield and Strawberry Alarm Clock as supporting acts,[28][59] these shows were poorly attended due in part to the political mood following the assassination of Martin Luther King that April.

[61] The Beatles also became disenchanted with the Maharishi and the Spiritual Regeneration Movement and publicly expressed their concerns around this time, which had a detrimental effect on the guru's standing among music fans.

[64] Writing in New York magazine, Loraine Alterman reported on the hostile audience reaction to the Maharishi but said that the songs the band included from Friends worked well beside the group's previous hits "because they were happy and full of love".

"[65] Because of the disappointing audience numbers and the Maharishi's subsequent withdrawal to fulfill film contracts, the remaining 24 tour dates were canceled at a cost estimated at $250,000 for the band (equivalent to $2.19 million in 2023).

[69] Love remembered that the group lacked "savvy marketing and design", and that while in Rishikesh, Paul McCartney had urged him "to take more care of what you put on your album covers".

[80] According to a Mojo retrospective, the band's remaining fanbase reacted to the album with the abandonment of "any hope that Brian Wilson would deliver a true successor to his 1966 masterwork", Pet Sounds.

[31] Stebbins noted that its "quirky gentleness in the context of political protests, race riots, and the war-torn social landscape of 1968 [made] it about as square a peg as one can imagine".

[81] Upon release, a Billboard reviewer predicted that "the group should score high on the charts" with the album and highlighted "Anna Lee, the Healer" and "Transcendental Meditation" as "catchy numbers".

"[82] Jazz & Pop's Gene Sculatti reported that there were detractors of the Beach Boys who most frequently took issue with the band's "apparently excessive immersion in and identification with mass culture and 'commercialism'".

"[35] In his review for NME, Allen Evans commented on the brevity of several of the tracks and described "Transcendental Meditation" as "a weirdo piece" and "Passing By" as "quite delightful" in its use of "voices … as instruments".

[23] AllMusic's Donald A. Guarisco described the album as a "cult favorite" among hardcore fans and highlighted the title track as "mellow", "lovely", and "a good example of the Beach Boys' late-'60s output: it is far less musically complex than 'California Girls' or 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' but possesses a homespun charm all its own.

"[4] An uncredited writer for Mojo opined that "Given distance and hindsight ... Friends is a uniquely rewarding Beach Boys album that, excepting Pet Sounds, is the group's most sonically and thematically unified.

[90] In his review for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger said that, relative to its unveiling in 1968, "Today [the album] sounds better, but it's certainly one of the group's more minor efforts", adding that the production and harmonies "remained pleasantly idiosyncratic, but there was little substance at the heart of most of the songs.

[92] Among other musicians, journalist and Saint Etienne co-founder Bob Stanley called the album a "lost gem" with a "timeless quality in its simplicity, underlined by the basic instrumentation".

[3] Shortly after the sale of Sea of Tunes, friend Stanley Shapiro persuaded Brian to rewrite and rerecord a number of Beach Boys songs to restore his public and industry reputation.

After contacting fellow songwriter Tandyn Almer for support, the trio spent a month reworking cuts from Friends,[102] including "Passing By", "Wake the World", "Be Still", and the album's title track.

[3] As Shapiro handed demo tapes to A&M Records executives, they found the product favorable before they learned of Wilson and Almer's involvement, and refused to support the project.

[23] Along with I Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessions, Wake the World was not issued on physical media due to the record company's wish not to interfere with the release of The Beach Boys with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.