Surf's Up

"Surf's Up" is a song recorded by the Beach Boys written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. It was originally intended for Smile, an unfinished Beach Boys album that was scrapped in 1967. The lyrics describe a man at a concert hall who experiences a spiritual awakening and resigns himself to God and the joy of enlightenment, the latter envisioned as a children's song.

A performance of the song by Brian Wilson was famously featured in the 1967 TV documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, where it was described as "too complex" to comprehend on a first listen and was interpreted by music scholars of the time as a sign that popular music was blossoming into a legitimate art form. Wilson's segment aroused great expectations for Smile, only for its cancellation to be disclosed to the press by Derek Taylor a month later.

Nothing in the song relates to surfing; the title is a play-on-words referring to the group shedding their image. Musically, the song was composed as a two-movement piece that modulates key several times and avoids conventional harmonic resolution. It features a coda based on another Smile track, "Child Is Father of the Man". The line "Columnated ruins domino" was elaborated on by Wilson, “Empires, ideas, lives, institutions; everything has to fall, tumbling like dominoes.”

The only surviving full-band recording of "Surf's Up" from the 1960s is the basic backing track of the first movement. There are three known recordings of Wilson performing the full song by himself, two of which were filmed for the 1967 documentary. Several years after Smile was scrapped, the band added new vocals and synthesizer overdubs to Wilson's first piano performance as well as the original backing track for inclusion on the 1971 album of the same name, with Carl on lead vocals for the first movement. Another recording from 1967 was found decades later and finally released for the 2011 archival compilation The Smile Sessions.