Taken at face value, The Drums‘ “Let’s Go Surfing” seems a simple throwback to a theme from early Sixties pop music. And it certainly sounds just as catchy as any Beach Boys or Jan & Dean 45 you might have stacked on the portable record player in your bedroom back then (well, in my time-machine dreams anyway).

However, the inspiration for the Brooklyn quartet’s “Let’s Go Surfing” didn’t come from the pursuit of the perfect wave, but rather the hope that much of America felt after Barack Obama won the presidency. The pervasive feeling that the tide had finally turned. Pretty deep, right?

As The Drums’ Jonathan Pierce explained to NME, “If you listen to the second verse, it’s very clearly about Obama being brought into the White House.” Those words would be: Wake up / There’s a new kid in the town / Honey, he’s moving into the big house / Remember when I was so very hopeless? / Darling, he’s gonna make it all better.

Naïve? Again, on paper, perhaps. Thinking back to Inauguration Day when he and Drums co-founder Jacob Graham wrote the tune, “Everything was very sensationalized and romanticized,” Pierce recalls. “It’s really about unbridled freedom, because it’s the first time we felt that freedom was tangible in America, not just something everyone always said.” But if you’ve come down from the high of those heady days or are of a different political stripe altogether, no matter. As Pierce told New York magazine this week, “That’s what’s great about pop music: You can take it at face value. You can listen to it and have it be about surfing for you.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Here’s the video for “Let’s Go Surfing,” which instead focuses on a different physically active gerund:

Purchase The Drums – Let’s Go Surfing via iTunes, Amazon MP3.