It's Getting Late

It's Getting Late: The Beach Boys Navigating the Mid-Eighties

Legends in a Changed Landscape

By the summer of 1985, The Beach Boys had been making music for nearly a quarter century. The group that had once represented the very idea of California youth culture was now a venerable institution, its founding genius Brian Wilson only intermittently present, the touring lineup a combination of original members and long-standing collaborators. To be a Beach Boys fan in 1985 was to hold two things simultaneously: a deep reverence for what had already been accomplished and a slightly anxious curiosity about where a group of this stature could go in the age of synthesizers and MTV.

The Album and the Context

It's Getting Late came from The Beach Boys, the group's self-titled album released in 1985 on Caribou Records. The album was an attempt to position the band for the contemporary market without abandoning the melodic instincts that had defined them. It featured production that leaned into the polished, keyboard-driven sound of mid-eighties pop, a choice that gave the record a commercial surface but also created some distance from the group's most beloved earlier work. For the band's core supporters, this was familiar territory: every decade had brought new attempts to update the sound, with varying degrees of success.

The Chart Run

It's Getting Late entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 3, 1985, at position 90. It rose over the following two weeks to reach its peak of 82 on August 17, 1985, then began a gradual descent, spending five weeks on the chart in total. The modest peak is telling. Even with the band's name recognition and the considerable promotional apparatus of a major label behind them, cracking the upper reaches of the chart in a summer dominated by acts like Tears for Fears, Aha, and Tina Turner was a different proposition than it had been in the early sixties. The song found its audience without generating the kind of crossover event needed to push into the top forty.

The Sound of 1985 Beach Boys

Musically, It's Getting Late leans into the melodic softness that the Beach Boys could deploy as comfortably as breathing. The harmonies are present and accounted for, though the production texture is unmistakably of its decade: gated drums, a synthetic brightness to the arrangement, the general gleam that mid-eighties studio technology applied to nearly everything it touched. The song's emotional register is warmer than urgent; it carries the kind of relaxed, slightly wistful quality that late-career Beach Boys recordings often find when they're working at their best. It sounds like a group that knows who they are, even when the surrounding landscape has shifted considerably.

Legacy and the Long Arc

The 1985 self-titled album occupies an interesting place in the Beach Boys' discography: it's neither among their most celebrated work nor among their most dismissed. Like much of their output from the era, it rewards listeners who approach it without demanding that it match the standards of Pet Sounds or Surfer Girl. Taken on its own terms, the record contains genuine melodic craft, and It's Getting Late is a reasonable showcase for the group's enduring ability to build a pleasing pop structure around a vocal blend that time has made unmistakable. Give it a spin and you'll hear a great American group doing what they've always done, finding harmonies in a world that keeps changing around them.

“It's Getting Late” — The Beach Boys' singular moment on the 1980s charts.