Carter Reeves spent nearly two years waiting for Wiz Khalifa to hear the song. When the completed verse finally arrived as an unlabelled MP3, the Surfer Girl frontman could hardly believe what he was hearing.
Surfer Girl have always treated genre like an open stretch of coastline rather than a fenced-in property. Reggae, indie pop, beach rock and hip-hop freely bleed into one another across the project’s catalogue, held together by Carter Reeves’ melodic instincts and the laid-back energy at the heart of the band.
On “Smoked Out,” Surfer Girl’s new single featuring Wiz Khalifa, those hip-hop roots move directly into the spotlight. Built around an old-school Wiz-inspired beat, the track brings Reeves’ rapping to the forefront before Khalifa slides into the haze with a verse that feels less like a celebrity add-on than the missing piece of the record.
For Reeves, the collaboration began without a writing session, a formal introduction or even a guarantee that the song would remain his.
“I think I was bored, probably had writer’s block one day, and felt inspired,” Reeves tells ThePier.org. “I said, ‘I’m going to make a Kush & Orange Juice-style beat.’”
Released by Wiz Khalifa in 2010, Kush & Orange Juice became one of the defining mixtapes of the rapper’s career, establishing a smoky, melodic sound built around soulful samples and unhurried production. Reeves returned to that era while constructing the foundation of “Smoked Out,” drawing particular inspiration from the production associated with Cardo.
“I wanted to make a Kush & OJ-type beat,” Reeves says. “Cardo, his producer, was making all this stuff with electric cowbell and these old, retro European samples. I stumbled across one and thought, ‘God, that feels like Kush & Orange Juice. I’m going to make a Kush & OJ-style beat.’”
What began as an exercise to shake loose a case of writer’s block quickly became something Reeves felt was too strong to leave sitting on a hard drive. He added his own verse and chorus, but the influence behind the production remained impossible to ignore.
“I wound up liking it,” Reeves says. “I recorded a verse and a chorus—the verse and chorus you hear now. This was probably three years ago at this point. I loved it with all my heart. I said, ‘This is awesome.’”
Once the song took shape, Reeves brought it to his label with an ambitious question: What would it take to get the track into Wiz Khalifa’s hands?
At that stage, he had no idea what a potential collaboration might look like. Wiz could have passed on it entirely. He could have taken the beat and rebuilt the song around himself. Or, in the best-case scenario, he could hear what Reeves had created and decide that Surfer Girl had already left the right space for him.
“I contacted the label and asked, ‘What are the chances we can get this into the hands of Wiz?’” Reeves recalls.
“I didn’t know if he would hear it and say, ‘I love this. I want it. Erase your vocals. I’m doing my own thing with it.’ In that case, I would have been thrilled that he wanted a song I wrote. I also didn’t know if he would like it enough to jump on it.”
Then came the waiting.
The process stretched across roughly two years, with updates arriving sporadically and long periods of silence in between. Reeves was repeatedly told that Wiz was preparing to hear the song, only for months to pass without a definitive answer.
“There was this back-and-forth over a year-and-a-half or two-year period,” Reeves says. “His management finally reached out and said, ‘Hey, he’s going to listen to it in the studio this week.’ A couple of months went by, and I didn’t hear anything. Then it was, ‘Yeah, he’s going to listen this week. I promise.’”
Eventually, the news Reeves had been waiting for arrived: Wiz loved the track and wanted to appear on it. Even then, Reeves resisted celebrating too early.
“Another couple of months went by, and then we heard, ‘He loves it. He wants to get on the song,’” Reeves says. “I thought, ‘All right, great. I’m not going to count my chickens before they hatch,’ but I was pretty geeked out at that point.”
Several more months passed before the finished verse unexpectedly appeared on Reeves’ phone. There was no grand announcement and no elaborate presentation—just a text message from Adam Gross at Ineffable containing an unidentified audio file.
“A few more months passed,” Reeves recalls. “Finally, I got a text from Adam Gross at Ineffable with an MP3 file. It wasn’t even labelled. It was something like ‘audio849.mp3.’ I thought it was a voice note or something.”
Reeves was on a tour bus in New York following a show when he pressed play. Within seconds, Wiz’s presence was unmistakable.
“I clicked it, the beat started, and I immediately thought, ‘Dude, this has to be Wiz on the song,’” Reeves says. “He was ad-libbing all the way through it, laughing and talking. Then he spit his verse. We were in New York on the bus after a show, and the whole band and I were losing it.”
“It was a crazy experience,” he adds. “It’s amazing. I still don’t think I’ve processed it. It’s mind-blowing to me that it was even possible.”
The most striking element of “Smoked Out” is how little it sounds like Surfer Girl twisting itself into an unnatural shape to accommodate a marquee guest. Reeves’ history as the former frontman of hip-hop and pop duo Aer has always remained part of Surfer Girl’s musical DNA. The collaboration simply pulls that influence forward, placing the band’s coastal identity alongside one of hip-hop’s most recognizable voices.
For Reeves, preserving that identity was essential. He has spent years learning how to collaborate without allowing another artist’s style, preferences or profile to overwhelm his own voice.
“I hate when something feels copied and pasted,” Reeves says. “It sounds like, ‘That’s a fish out of water on that one.’”
That concern initially made him wonder whether the beat leaned too heavily toward Wiz Khalifa and not enough toward Surfer Girl. The band ultimately revisited the production, reshaping the song to match the atmosphere of Midnight, the album on which “Smoked Out” appears.
“Honestly, I was a little worried at first,” Reeves admits. “I thought, ‘This might not even be enough of a Surfer Girl song. This might be too much.’”
“We finessed the beat and reproduced it with the new focus of the album,” he continues. “That’s what I’m most proud of. It genuinely feels like a Surfer Girl song, but it’s also something that is clearly connecting with Wiz Khalifa’s fans and clearly connected with him. I think we threaded that needle in a nice way.”
That needle is precisely where “Smoked Out” finds its spark. The single does not position reggae rock and hip-hop as opposing worlds in need of a forced crossover. Instead, Surfer Girl and Wiz Khalifa meet on musical ground they already share: loose melodies, hazy production and an effortless sense of cool.
After nearly three years of writing, waiting and refusing to count his chickens before they hatched, Reeves finally has the collaboration he once imagined in the middle of a bout of writer’s block. “Smoked Out” may have been built in the image of classic Wiz Khalifa, but its final form belongs unmistakably to Surfer Girl.
Watch the full interview below:
