THERE IS NOTHING, WE know, more evocative of time, place, moment than a particular favourite song. Among the most acute in this regard are those reminding us of our summers past, the mood and temperature of them. The different senses they stir. The long, hot days of our childhood. The melancholy at the end of a summer’s evening, a cool breeze to go with the heat. The bittersweetness of a first crush. The promise of an open highway. The sepia-tint of a faded golden era.
Summer’s songs, those explicitly of and about the season, or the ones simply conjuring the feel and trace of it, are enduring, will never fail to spark us to revelry. They’re the warmth on our backs, the catch in our throats.
Compiling this list, I was struck, first of all, by their intrinsic common threads – melodic, harmonic, lyrical. Often as not, those things rooted in one or other of the California fantasia created in Brian Wilson’s head, or Caribbean jams, or with the eternal euphoria of a Motown or Phil Spector production.
Then again, by how perfectly formed and composed the very best of them are. How they crescendo like a sunrise, linger like a sunset. Within them are our dreams departed, our lost souls, the hopes we cling to, the warm beat of our best of times. They are all of our yesterdays, each of our yearned-for tomorrows.
Upon pressing ‘play’, we’re spirited right back to our glory days. As the man sang it, they’re gone forever, and we should just let them go, but…
Where else to start. Written by George Harrison at Eric Clapton’s country pile in Surrey, one especially sunny day in April. Cut for Abbey Road, Harrison on a prototype Moog, John Lennon having skipped the session, as irresistible, as soothing as the feel of the sun on your back.
Seeking to match Phil Spector’s monumental production of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, Brian Wilson took seven months, using four different studios and 40 session players, to realise his grandest ‘pocket symphony’. A dazzling head-rush whenever, wherever you hear it.
Written by Withers with ace balladeer Skip Scarborough, Ray Parker Jr, of Ghostbusters theme tune fame, on guitar, and with Withers’s 18-second sustained note on ‘daaaaaa…..y’ at its climax. Not so much a song as the sensation of being eased down into a hammock.
The Spoonful’s songwriter-in-chief, John Sebastian, co-opted a song brother Mike had written at 14 for this, their signature moment. Summoning the urgency of evening’s relief after a broiling day in the city. Unforgettable in any context, even including over the opening credits of something as hokey as Die Hard With a Vengeance.
Title track of the soft rock overlords’ fourth album, and easy as a summer’s Sunday morning. Adeptly covered by the Isley Brothers also, but in Dash Croft’s and Jim Seals’ hands, like being taken out on a yacht and rocked on an ever so gentle sea.
Cross’ debut single, and what a way to start. The tale is one of a con on the run to the Mexican border, but blessed with Michael Omartian’s soaring production, Michael McDonald on back-ups, and the great Lenny Castro’s percussion fills, it’s the ultimate top-down-driving-anthem.
Released weeks in advance of their epochal set at Woodstock, this is Sly and his Family also before the darkness and madness set in, when he had magic at his fingertips, pop-soul miracles at his command.
Gifted to them by Marvin Gaye, who also drummed on the track, and cut in two stellar takes. Singing it, Martha Reeves envisaged a riotous block party and ended up with a song that could start one.
Not the 3:42 seven-inch mix, but the epic 8:15 version opening the Risque album. All the better to savour the extraordinary interplay between Nile Rogers’ funk-in-excelsis guitar and Bernard Edwards’ elastic bass, blended together a summons to even the most rhythmically challenged among us to get up and move.
Factually, Brian ‘Dangermouse’ Burton was inspired by the era of great Spaghetti Western soundtracks (it even includes a sample of a song, ‘Last Men Standing’, from one, 1968’s Django, Prepare a Coffin) when pulling together this debut single in tandem with Cee Lo Green. More pointedly, he hit upon a universal feelgood sound. ‘Crazy’ spent nine consecutive weeks at Number One cheering the UK.
“I was working part time in a five and dime, my boss was Mr. McGee,” it begins, scene established, musical vibe, technicolour psych-pop, set already. Thereafter, the pocket-sized polymath simply hits the button marked ‘Instant Sunshine’. Genius at work.
Marley had disco in mind when he had the Wailers put down this opening track to the Uprising album. The loose-limbed groove they locked into, twitchy, seductive, could raise the dead to dance.
Pop-soul’s other genius-polymath, here paying homage to the aforementioned Marley in that same year of 1980. Wonder was never again to be quite so unfathomably great, but then, this is a titanic brew.
The title was Alex Chilton’s doff of the cap to the Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls’, and the song went down onto six-track tape for his band’s second album, Radio City. Hardly anyone at the time got to know about it. Hearing it now, gleeful, glorious, that borders on the criminal.
Fourth single lifted off the classic Nicks-Buckingham-McVie-McVie-Fleetwood line-up’s first comeback album, Tango in the Night. It’s Christine McVie’s song and dreamy vocal, Lindsay Buckingham’s master-craftsman touches with the feather-light harmonies. Altogether, wonderful.
Petty wrote up what he saw driving down Ventura Boulevard each day. Mike Campbell added a ringing 12-string guitar hook. Producer Jeff Lynne brought the widescreen production and the repetitive chord pattern from one of ELO’s old hits, ‘Evil Woman’. The resulting mix is magical.
The Mike Campbell song Tom Petty rejected for the Southern Accents album and Henley turned to solid gold. No-one cannot be spirited back to their first summer love by the line, “I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun.” No-one, surely, for whom this does not stir their soul.
Written by the brothers Finn, Tim and Neil, on the first day of sessions for the Woodface album. The arrangement’s a rare one but works like a charm. The wait for a chorus to arrive out of the morning mist of verses, and then three of them shine through, one after another, like sunbeams.
Opening track of their last hurrah, Under the Blacklight, and testifying to the sheer fabulousness of Jenny Lewis, here making the act of reimagining – and matching – Fleetwood Mac in their mid-’70s imperious phase sound as effortless as a summer’s stroll in the park.
Rick Rubin producing, strings-and-piano-coloured blue-eyed soul in her sights, and from the point Lana Del Rey sings – the voice unmistakeable now, wounded and sensual all at once – the opening line, “I’ve been out on that open road,” a heavenly lift off.
It’s Rick Rubin at the desk again and upon which the incomparable John Frusciante announced his return to the Chilis after a 16-year absence. Frusciante’s searing guitar back at the heart of things, nonsense lyrics (“Platypus are few, the secret life of roo,” anyone?), belter of a song.
Doug Hopkins’s greatest song is just plain one of the all-time great songs, of summer or otherwise. It embodies the other aspect of the season, its ache, the never-to-be-forgotten pain of a doomed, lost love. Tragically, Hopkins took his own life the same year it was released. This monument he left behind will forever stand tall.
Not someone more normally associated with a carefree attitude to life, Mellencamp here plugs into the spirit of lazing on a summer’s afternoon and comes up trumps. Whoever “Bobie Doll and Big Jim Picato” are, and whyever “they don’t work and they don’t want to,” they sound like they’ve got it made.
Maggie Rogers’ Don’t Forget Me album is a stupidly underrated, classic-pop masterpiece. Together with collaborator Ian Fitchuk, Rogers cut a song a day, in the chronological order in which they were written, at New York’s storied Electric Lady studio. Eighth to be put down, this is one of its best. Terrific scene-setting opening line, too: “Smooth out the lines on my face in the mirror and think about what I’m gonna do.” The eternal promise of a summer’s morning carried off by a driving, sugar-sweet melody.
Track two on the mighty Escape, right on the heels of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, Steve Perry going off into the stratosphere, a rocking Sam Cooke. “In the heat with a blue jean girl,” Perry sings, Neil Schon’s FM radio-friendly riff boosting him up, AOR nirvana.
Sat facing each other in their writing room, Adams and songwriting partner Jim Vallance swapped recollections of their youthful summers, the best days of their lives. Then put them into a starburst of a song. Bonus points for sneaking the “me and my baby in a 69” line past the radio censors.
Outlier track on the otherwise hard-punching, state-of-the-nation Magic album, this is the Boss getting his Brian Wilson game on, such a lush pop extravaganza and with a keening heart.
First single to come off of Bat Out of Hell. Jim Steinman’s operatic impression of Phil Spector-meeting-Motown, the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg respectively on piano and drums, the erstwhile Marvin Lee Aday heroically voicing Steinman’s fever-dream teen fantasy: “It was a hot summer night, and the beach was burning/There was fog crawling over the sand.” No other word for it but magnificent.
At end, the ultimate, pop-symphonic summation of a summer’s day. Written by Jeff Lynne at a Swiss chalet, after two weeks of miserable weather, and as the sun broke at last over the Alps. That feeling bottled, and turned wondrously, marvellously loose.
Now listen to all of these Summer Breezes on the playlist at the link:
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