opera glasses, and horse-drawn carriages. It quotes the titles of the short stories "The Diamond Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant and "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. The lyrics also espouse themes related to childhood and God, similar to other songs written for Smile ("Wonderful" and "Child Is Father of the Man"). The title is a play on words referring to the group shedding their image. In surfing, "surf's up" means that the conditions of the waves are good, but when the phrase arrives in the song, it is used to conjure an image of a tidal wave. In Jules Siegel's October 1967 memoir for Cheetah magazine, "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God", he quoted Wilson offering a lengthy explanation of the album's lyrics. Reportedly, the song is about "a man at a concert" that is overtaken by music. "Columnated ruins domino" symbolizes the collapse of "empires", "ideas", "lives", and "institutions". After the lyric "canvas the town and brush the backdrop", the song's protagonist sets "off on his vision, on a trip". He then suffers a "choke of grief" at "his own suffering and the emptiness of life". At the end, he finds hope and returns "to the tides, to the beach, to childhood" before experiencing "the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God", which manifests in a children's song. Wilson concluded his summary, "Of course that's a very intellectual explanation. But maybe sometimes you have to do an intellectual thing." Music historian Clinton Heylin suggests that Wilson had merely repeated an explanation that was originally given by Parks. Singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb interpreted the song as "a premonition of what was going to happen to our generation and... to our music—that some great tragedy that we could absolutely not imagine was about to befall our world." Academic Larry Starr wrote, "Van Dyke Parks’s poetic and allusive lyrics articulate the progression from a condition of disillusionment with a decadent and materialistic culture to the glimpse of a possibility for hope and renewal. This is all conveyed via an abundance of musical references and imagery." Lambert said that the song prophesies an optimism for those who can capture the innocence of youth. In the view of journalist Domenic Priore, the song was "a plea for the establishment to consider the wisdom coming out of youth culture in 1966." Starr further described it as "a very serious song, with an underlying somber tone