Catch a Wave

The tsunami tragedy just got slightly more personal to me: According to Brian Wilson's website, Markus Sandlund, one of the gaggle of adorable Swedish backup musicians whom I recently saw accompany him on his Smile tour, was swept away by the wave and is among the missing.

What's ironic is that before the tour finished and Sandlund went on holiday to Thailand, he'd spent night after night backing Brian up on the song "Surf's Up", which peaks dramatically with the lyric "Surf's up ... aboard a tidal wave". Considering that lyric was the work of Brian's collaborator Van Dyke Parks, who put some of his most notoriously inscrutable lyrics into that very song, things suddenly got very literal.