‘Heroes and Villains’ is a song by the American rock band The Beach Boys, co-written by the group's leader Brian Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks. Composed in early 1966, mostly in a large sandbox holding a piano built in Brian Wilson's living room, ‘Heroes and Villains’ was the first collaboration between Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. Wilson had enormously high hopes for ‘Heroes and Villains’ as the follow-up single to ‘Good Vibrations’. When the single failed to significantly replicate this success, it is said to have destroyed his self-imposed competitive rivalry to The Beatles.