with himself "Takin' one little inch at a time, now / 'Til we're feelin' fine, now". Wilson said, "I remember when I wrote that I was thinkin' 'truckin' down the highway' – just some kind of a country western kind of an idea. The actual song itself wasn't that country though." "Ding Dang" is a short song, consisting of a single verse and chorus, that Wilson wrote with the Byrds' Roger McGuinn in the early 1970s. McGuinn recalled that Wilson had one day visited his home asking for amphetamines. After they worked together on the song, McGuinn went to bed. The next morning, he found that Wilson was still awake playing "Ding Dang" on the piano. Only one lyric was ever written: "I love a girl and I love her madly / I treat her so fine but she treats me so badly". Jardine surmised that Wilson's longtime obsession with the folk standard "Shortenin' Bread" may have originated from this impromptu writing session for "Ding Dang". Wilson recorded "Ding Dang" in the studio on numerous occasions during the mid-1970s. Mankey noted that "everybody who showed up [to the sessions] got subjected to 'Ding Dang'." It appeared on the album with a less than one-minute runtime, virtually unaltered from how Wilson and McGuinn originally left it. Side two "Solar System" discusses the planetary system in a similar vein as the band's 1965 hit "California Girls". In the song, the narrator asks, "What do the planets mean? / And have you ever seen / sunrise in the mornin'? / It shined when you were born". "The Night Was So Young", according to Carlin, revels in "traditional shades of self-pity, jealousy, and loneliness". It was written about Wilson's mistress, Debbie Keil, and her nightly visits to his home. Stebbins called it "a direct descendent of Pet Sounds in both sound and attitude." "I'll Bet He's Nice" follows similar themes as the previous track. "Let's Put Our Hearts Together" is a duet between Wilson and his first wife Marilyn. In the song, they discuss the insecurities that they feel for each other before coming together to "see what we can cook up between us". Wilson said that he enlisted Marilyn as a vocalist because he had inadvertently composed the song in a key outside of his vocal range. "I Wanna Pick You Up", in Carlin's description, concerns an "object of desire" that is "either