Brian believes; "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." In Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile, 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." An apparently complete backing track for the first (2:20) section was recorded and mixed in November 1966, but vocals and other overdubs were still to be added, and work on the middle and closing sections was either never undertaken, or never finished.