Surf's Up (song) - Lyrical Themes

Lyrical Themes

Brian has said that "the lyrics for 'Surf's Up' were very Van Dyke; only he could have done that – only Van Dyke could have written those lyrics. We wrote that at my Chickering piano, I think, in my sandbox and it took us about an hour at most to write the whole thing. We wrote it pretty fast; it all happened like it should." When asked by Van Dyke Parks what Wilson was feeling when he wrote the music for "Surf's Up," he responded with, "I just felt some love, I felt a whole lot of love, there was a whole lot of love going on at the time." In 1966, Wilson elaborated on every lyric of the song in great detail:

It’s a man at a concert. All around him there’s the audience, playing their roles, dressed up in fancy clothes, looking through opera glasses, but so far away from the drama … Empires, ideas, lives, institutions—everything has to fall, tumbling like dominoes. He begins to awaken to the music; sees the pretentiousness of everything … A choke of grief. At his own sorrow and the emptiness of his life, because he can’t even cry for the suffering in the world, for his own suffering. And then, hope. Surf’s up! … I heard the word—of God; Wonderful thing—the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God. And what is it? A children’s song! And then there’s the song itself; the song of children; the song of the universe rising and falling in wave after wave, the song of God, hiding His love from us, but always letting us find Him again, like a mother singing to her children. Of course that’s a very intellectual explanation. But maybe sometimes you have to do an intellectual thing. If they don’t get the words, they’ll get the music, because that’s where it’s really at, in the music.

— Brian Wilson,

The title of "Surf's Up" was a double entendre suggesting that The Beach Boys' earlier, simpler surfing-related material was now "finished". The song is noted for quoting the two lines from the French song "Frere Jacque". The lyrics also reference the title of the Scottish song "Auld Lang Syne".