“Feel Flows” by The Beach Boys

Carl Wilson wrote "Feel Flows" with the Beach Boys' manager, Jack Rieley, for Surf's Up, the band's 1971 album, and it was one of Wilson's first songs. He cut the backing track before any words existed, then gave Rieley a tape of the bare-bones idea. Rieley played it over and over at home until the lyrics came, and decades later ranked it among his finest times in a studio.

The sound is a head trip, and Wilson explained the trick to Rolling Stone that year: piano played twice and overdubbed, the track run at shifting speeds with a variable speed oscillator so the piano came out a touch out of tune, then organ sent dry down one side of the stereo and through a Moog synthesizer on the other. Stephen W. Desper engineered and mixed, and the band produced.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.