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!
