Summer is the best season for making musical memories – and when you align a certain period of time with a specific summer song, the memory is usually as salient as anything injured by lilac or peony. Fragrance gets all the glory when it comes to invoking memories, but a certain piece of music can be just as resonant. For this post, I’m recreating a playlist of the past, from some of my favorite summer songs. Not all of these came out in the sunny season, but that’s when I find myself playing them the most, so they have become my own set of summer songs. There is also no artistically-intentional sequence, for the most part, so if you’re looking for a deeper narrative you’ve got the wrong season. It’s summer; the living, and the listening, is supposed to be easy. I’ll only embed the first tune, and leave the rest for you to find and peruse on your own. I’m told Spotify is a great way to discover new music, so do what the cool kids do and go forth along that avenue (then teach me how to use it so I can follow). 

My classic summer playlist begins with one of the very few upbeat and happy Enya songs ever written, and it was part of a Crystal Light commercial that aired during my childhood. A very strong memory of sipping their iced tea while sucking on hard raspberry candies (the ones that came in a round little tin with pretty pictures of pink fruit on top) all while watching the NBC daytime line-up is what this song conjures for me – a stagnant but cool moment that would inform a lifetime of drama thanks to the inspirational mayhem found on ‘Days of Our Lives’, ‘Another World’ and ‘Santa Barbara’. 

Alan’s Classic Summer Playlist 

1. Orinoco Flow – Enya
2. Cherish – Madonna
3. Love Will Never Do – Janet Jackson
4. Rush, Rush – Paula Abdul
5. Miss Chatelaine – k.d. lang
6. Sanssouci – Rufus Wainwright
7. It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over – Lenny Kravitz
8. How We Used to Live – Saint Etienne
9. Stars Are Blind – Paris Hilton
10. I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) – Whitney Houston
11. Alone – Heart
12. Doesn’t Really Matter – Janet Jackson
13. Turn Up the Radio – Madonna
14. Human Nature – Michael Jackson
15. Holding Back the Years – Simply Red
16. Don’t Dream It’s Over – Crowded House
17. Your Wildest Dreams – The Moody Blues
18. Liquid Love – Madonna
19. Don’t Say Your Love Is Killing Me – Erasure
20. No One Is To Blame – Howard Jones
21. This Used To Be My Playground – Madonna
22. Playground Love – Air
23. Wicked Game – Chris Isaak
24. Summer Turns to High – R.E.M.
25. Delta Dawn – Helen Reddy
26. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered – Ella Fitzgerald version
27. The Glory of Love – Peter Cetera
28. Ray of Light – Madonna
29. Something New – Axwell & Ingrosso
30. It Must Have Been Love – Roxette
31. Where the Boys Are – Connie Francis
32. Poses – Rufus Wainwright

Some of these songs go way back, and are only summer-like thanks to my own singular machinations of when I played them the most. You probably have your own summer songs – the ones that mean something only to you, and have come to embody the summers of your youth. That’s when music seems to matter most.

And so I play the music of my own summer youth, rekindling old memories and burning a few new ones. I’ve purposely left out more recent songs in service of future blog posts, and perhaps another summer playlist before the season is out. Maybe by then I’ll figure out this Spotify thing and enter the current decade…

Taking the pressure off is a summer habit we learn from our very first summers free from school. Somehow, even with jobs that run year-round, some of us manage to maintain that idea of releasing the pressure in the summer months – the living being easy and everything. Even if it doesn’t involve vacations or beach-trips or even time off, there is a mood and atmosphere to summer that slows everything down. This season, I’m jumping on board and taking things a little easier here too – and that begins with a bohemian theme that is really just an excuse to be lazy and messy and unfocused – the best possible attitude to hold for summer. 

Doffing the swim trunks and skinny dipping is a bohemian rite of passage, and a fitting entry into the summer season. When you’ve been bound by pants and belts and shirts and ties since last summer, there is a fundamental freedom in gliding through the water completely unfettered. Summer unfurls in liberating fashion, recalling the heady glory of that last day of school. I remember walking home from a last day of fifth or sixth grade and throwing my pencils up in the air like some graduation commercial. 

Summer in these parts has always been coupled with music – and every first day of the season comes with a musical accompaniment. Here are a few of those songs and related posts:

Last summer it was ‘How We Used to Live‘ – a song that went back decades to a summer in Boston. Later that night, it was all about the ‘Summer Wine‘.

A virtual visit to ‘San Remo’ was the musical theme for the summer of 2021, along with an early salvo of  ‘Where the Boys Are‘. (The latter also closed out the summer in a slower format.)

In case anyone has forgotten the summer of 2020 (and my how we have all tried) it’s here in a song ~ ‘Vincent: Starry, Starry Night‘ – but it was the ‘Second Night Of Summer‘ that touched me more. 

June 2019 feels like a lifetime ago, and in many ways it was one of the last moments of innocence before we all understood what a deadly worldwide pandemic was really like – even if we didn’t want to know. The music was lighter, as were the blog posts, and I’m still looking for the way back there. 

‘Don’t Dream It’s Over‘ was the languid shuffler that kicked off the summer of 2018. When this music plays, summer memories are conjured – the certain cadence of musical notes as much a trigger of memory as scent and fragrance. Water hyacinths named by a poet, and the unnamed pain that summer sometimes wrought. 

Music and summer are a combustible pairing. Each feeds into the other, and it’s never ‘Too Much’ despite what the Spice Girls might say. The best way to save a summer day is to put it into a song. 

As for this summer and its bohemian spirit, I’m going to do my best to keep things relaxed and easy, taking the moments as they come, inhabiting each day whether it’s sunny or rainy or something infuriatingly in-between. Summer should be the least-serious season, and I’m just starting to celebrate that. Swimsuits off! 

Norma Desmond may not be the ideal image of a human being aging gracefully, considering she ended up murdering a bloke when confronted with her own age and reality, but the woman who portrayed her so magnificently, Gloria Swanson, had quite a different story. Swanson turned her life after ‘Sunset Boulevard’ into one glorious adventure after another, and while she never matched the once-in-a-lifetime frisson of her portrayal of Ms. Desmond, she went on to live quite a happily-ever-after, and so we take a page out of her 1972 book to revisit these wonderful photographs by Allan Warren (a fuller set of which may be found on Trey Speegle’s exquisite website here). They form the inspirational kick-off for my summer wardrobe, and since caftans forgive the most devilish of middle-age paunches I’m running with it. Aside from the free-flowing form, however, I’m transfixed by the colors – both of her outfit and the surrounding green of her Fifth Avenue apartment. 

The idea of summer in New York City has fascinated me, and as much as I attempted to avoid it, there would invariably come a moment when I had to be in the city for something in the middle of summer, and I always wondered how the locals did it for the entire season. When the heat got into absolutely every stationary thing – sidewalk, street, cement, building, subway station, stairwell, and entryway – I wondered how anyone kept their cool. For someone like Ms. Swanson, it appears she stayed chill by keeping her wardrobe vibrant and alive. That brings us to a song from the 1970 musical ‘Applause’ which was a loose musical adaptation of ‘All About Eve’. Flashes of brilliance from the black-and-white past lend a summer sparkle to this last post of spring. 

Like Lauren Bacall, who starred in ‘Applause’, Swanson was a show-business survivor. These photos were reportedly taken in her apartment at 4 AM after she finished a performance in one of her shows. I’ve seen an interview where she recalls getting her second wind at 11 PM. As someone who’s typically in bed at that time after sleeping through his first wind, I’m struck by the drive it takes to make one a star, and how that drive never really goes away for some people. 

I’m also struck by the idea of a New York City apartment in the 1970’s – this one looks like a quieter cousin of the one held by Diana Vreeland, so boldly soaked in red, red, RED. It conjures the notion of creating little floating hubs of beauty in the midst of a city besieged by heat and humidity and the general stickiness of summer. 

Such colorful fabulousness is a much-appreciated jolt in a season that hasn’t given us many hints of warmth in the last few weeks. Perhaps this post will change that as we turn the page to summer proper.