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TL;DR:

  • Bruce Johnston wrote some of The Beach Boys’ songs and Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs.”
  • Johnston said one of the songs he wrote was supposed to be like Back to the Future.
  • The song came out before Back to the Future.
The Beach Boys near a car
The Beach Boys | Michael Ochs Archives / Handout

Bruce Johnston is a longtime member of The Beach Boys. He wrote The Beach Boys’ “Disney Girls (1957).” Subsequently, he compared the song to Back to the Future. 

Bruce Johnston wrote songs for The Beach Boys and Barry Manilow’s ‘I Write the Songs’

Johnston wrote The Beach Boys’ songs “Disney Girls (1957),” “Deirdre,” “She Believes in Love Again,” and “Tears in the Morning.” He also penned Barry Manilow’s hit “I Write the Songs.”

During a 2022 interview with Uncut, Johnston named “Disney Girls (1957)” one of his favorite songs from The Beach Boys’ catalog. “I’d been writing this song I thought it was kinda sad but I was having the greatest life, I was surfing, I stayed away from drugs and alcohol, I’d come home and just go surfing and write songs and I realized as we slip into 1970-ish when we were rediscovered, that we were hip and cool again because of playing Carnegie Hall,” he said.

Bruce Johnston said he ‘time traveled’ like ‘Back to the Future’ when he wrote The Beach Boys’ ‘Disney Girls (1957)’

Johnston discussed what it was like playing Carnegie Hall. “We came back and suddenly The Beach Boys were so hip and cool that people in high school, all those precocious New York guys and girls decided ‘hey, we’ll go and see The Beach Boys, and we’ll show them we can smoke weed, how cool!'” he said. “I thought to myself as I watched it, ‘How not cool.'”

Johnston compared the track to Back to the Future. “I thought I should keep the song that I started but make it a happy song like Back to the Future, so I wrote about what it was like for me at their age, 15, 16, 17,” he said. “I time traveled back in that song.”

For context, “Disney Girls (1957)” came out in 1971 while Back to the Future came out in 1985. Johnston couldn’t have been thinking of Back to the Future when he wrote “Disney Girls (1957).” He was probably saying he wanted the song to be nostalgic like Back to the Future. Notably, both the song and the film depict the 1950s in an incredibly romanticized way. Interestingly, most of the Disney Princess movies hadn’t come out yet by 1957, the year the song is about.

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How ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ and its parent album performed on the pop charts in the United States

“Disney Girls (1957)” was never a single. It appeared on the album Surf’s Up. The album reached No. 29 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for 17 weeks in total. Surf’s Up was not nearly as popular as earlier Beach Boys albums.

“Disney Girls (1957)” came out before Back to the Future but Johnston felt they had a similar vibe.

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