a brief sample of songs that are "the song of the summer"
every song can be a song of the summer if you want it to be. but then again maybe it can't.
the impetus behind this newsletter is that i was like “jesus christ, carrie, you sent two heavy miss serious essays in a row, lighten up” and also because i simply could not get my brain organized enough to finish fleshing out and sequencing what would be another highly thought out seasonal playlist. (can you believe i even thought i’d break up what would usually be summer edition v. viii into two playlists, an up one and mellow one!?) so instead i did something i thought would be easier but probably wasn’t: i wrote you all some 2500 words about an extremely chaotic and random sampling of songs that are on what is still a hopeless mess of a dump draft version of my summer playlist so far. the “song of the summer” title is meaningless! stop trying to give it to new songs that every year feel more and more ai-engineered to wear that crown and give it instead to the songs you actually like to listen to in summer!!!
“Ultimate” - Lindsay Lohan1
Every day I have to wake up and pretend that I’m completely fine with the fact that Pink Slip was a fictional band from the 2003 film Freaky Friday and not a real mid-2000s pop-punk act that rocketed to stardom after playing Wango Tango at LA’s House of Blues. Unfortunately for us, Disney refuses to add the film version of “Take Me Away,” complete with Jamie Lee Curtis’s ripping guitar solo (a scene that, I kid you not, I think about approximately three times a week) to streaming. But that’s okay because they DO have “Ultimate” on there, a great Lindsay Lohan pop banger if there ever was one and a song of the summer because every summer, essentially, I just want to feel like I’m living in a teen movie.
Even if I’m just a very small supporting character or even a background actor with no lines—I want to crawl inside a teen movie and live there forever. Nothing very bad can happen to you in a teen movie aside from some delicious, petty drama (the kind that doesn’t happen in real life after the age of 25—and if it does, reexamine some things!—but even the post-high school-pre-25 petty drama lacks the same grand scale flavor), and petty drama is fun at that age. Summer in a teen movie is about driving around with your friends and spending all day at someone’s pool—unless you have to work at a minimum wage job which you complain about incessantly even though in retrospect it really honestly is not that bad, you’re 16 for fucks sake shut up—and going to a friend of a friend’s party at night and staying out past curfew and maybe accidentally swapping bodies with your mom and okay maybe all of those except the last one are not exclusive to movies. So maybe I’m just saying every summer I simply want music that makes me feel like a teen.
Anyway, I have been a Lindsay Lohan fan/apologist/comeback-encourager for at least two decades (I saw Georgia Rule four, possibly five, times in theaters) and one thing I am always saying: Lindsay Lohan had some bops. She had some bops and she could sing, which is one thing Hilary Duff could simply never say. No one wants me to write about Speak (2004) as a great pop album of our time—“Rumors” fucking goes are you kidding me—let alone the family trauma-tinged A Little More Personal (2005) so I’ll leave it at this crowd favorite and go.
“The One That Got Away” - MUNA
Does it sound a little like a b-side from their perfect slice of pop 2022 self-titled album? Yes. Am I going to complain about a new MUNA song—full of ice cold gated reverb snares and the thing they do in 80s songs where they make the bass sound squiggly, summer sounds in and of themselves—about being hot and mean? No! That’s what summer is all about, baby!!!
“Miracles Happen” - Myra
The other day I was listening to my pov you’re at limited too in the early 2000s playlist and texted my sister “ya therapy is nice but have you ever just played miracles happen from the princess diaries soundtrack on repeat”? And you know what, I stand by it. A good song of the summer should provide both a mental escape—and what better way to escape than listening to the music of the time in your youth when you had no real honest to god problems other than not having enough cash to buy an Orange Julius AND an Auntie Annes’ pretzel at the mall—and big main character energy that gives you a shot of confidence that makes you think you can do anything, including but not limited to running a small fictional country. This is practically engineered to hit both.
“Johnny Velvet” - Caitlin Rose
Look, I love good lyrics about dissociation and a groovy, hypnotic bassline, and “Johnny Velvet” has both. “Johnny Velvet” is a perfect summer song because Caitlin Rose makes it sound so good to feel so bad, and isn’t that what summer is? “Johnny Velvet” sounds like what it feels like when you stick your arm out of the window of the car and make waves in the air knowing in the back of your mind a sign could come along and rip it off at any moment. It’s laying in an empty bathtub because that’s the coolest spot in your apartment when you’re too scared of your future electric bill to run the AC. It’s the gooey melted street tar sticking to the bottom of your sandal, the empty bottle of wine at the park hang that was too much and not enough, the heavy hanging summer air late at night that has refused to thin.
“It Ain’t Nothing to Me” - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Almost every TPATH song is a song of the summer but the synth-pop bend of Southern Accent’s second half is something I can only really listen to when the temperature cracks 75. “It Ain’t Nothing to Me” is a song that probably could have come out today, which is to say it’s a lot like the other smattering of rock songs that came out in the mid to late-80s where our great boomer rock stars looked around at technology’s rapid developments and said “I mean…sure it’s making advancements but the vibe feels off to me.” They were right!
Sometimes I’m like “I wish Tom Petty was around to chime in on all this” but more often I’m like “Thank god Tom Petty checked out before all this.” It’s not that Tom Petty was prophetic in making a danceable pop song about our attempts to simply ignore the increasingly surreal and horrific world around us. It’s just that culture is cyclical, babe! The nightmare never ends!
“Saints” - The Breeders
I mean, yes, there is the “summer is ready when you are” chorus, but that is not what makes “Saints” a song of the summer. “Saints” is a song of the summer because a song of the summer should make you feel like you’re a little dirtbag running around town getting into shit with your friends, which is a perfect way to describe the vibe of most Breeders songs.
“Some Day I’ll Be a Farmer” - Melanie
Isn’t it kind of insane how we have to sit inside at our desks and send our little emails and climb that corporate ladder and make our silly little livings even though it’s nice outside. This is a song that’s about that, and about how any time I spend more than 24 hours outside of New York I fantasize about giving up the rat race to “live a simple life” even though I know I would be so bored after a week. It’s also about how every summer I genuinely think I’ll, like, grow some little vegetables inside my apartment and be a sustainable eat only fresh things that nature gives me kind of crunchy granola girl (but one who believes in vaccines) but the closest I ever really get is buying some of my produce from the weekly greenmarket instead of Trader Joe’s because honestly who am I kidding.
“Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” - Paul Simon
It’s so crazy to me that anyone would listen to anything other than Paul Simon’s Concert in Central Park in the summer, even though I put seven blurbs of non-Paul Simon songs before this and even though I’m going with the Graceland version and not the live one, but anyway. You already know what I’m going to say: summer is Paul Simon’s season, baby. You put on a Paul Simon album and I promise you everyone, all ages, will have a good time, and if anyone doesn’t, then…I don’t know maybe you shouldn’t associate with them.
Most Paul Simon songs are Dad Songs, not in that they are for dads or about dads but in that they are like dads because they’re really just a guy telling a longwinded story about this crazy thing that happened to him one time. “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” is no exception; it just has an elasticity to it. Sometimes it’s your dad, specifically, telling you, specifically, a story where you’re confused most of the time and begging him to get to the point (when Paul Simon goes “I could say ooo ooo ooo oooo oooo as if everybody knows what I’m talking about”..........like, who the fuck was this everybody he was referring to?). But sometimes it’s a dad, conceptually, telling a story at a party when he’s a decade or two younger—not young, just younger than he is now—about a mythical-seeming version of life when he was actually young, a time when everything was easy and the thrills were cheap and there were no cell phones, at least none come by easily, and love and adventure could be found on any seemingly ordinary night in the big city. It’s the fantasy of a memory, but I’ll spare you. It’s a summer song. We don’t have to get that deep.
“The Hardest Button to Button” - The White Stripes
This isn’t really a song of the summer so much as it is a hyperfixation byproduct of my biannual “I should learn drums” phase that is happening to occur during this summer. Most of the time in the past I could easily talk myself out of it like “No, Carrie, you don’t have the upper body strength to be a drummer, you would get so so tired” but I’m lowkey strong now so I’m like “ya I’d fucking rule.” Relax—I still know myself well enough to know (a) I cannot be that asshole with a drum set in their New York City apartment (b) I would grow tired of it in two weeks once I realize I won’t be brilliant at it right away and it would then just be an expensive toy collecting dust. I am not getting a drum set any time in the near future! But that doesn’t mean I don’t sit on a little stool in front of my couch with various pillows arranged just so as a “kit” and my drumsticks I bought years ago during one of these phases to “practice” and pretend I’m Meg White. So maybe it is a song of the summer because summer is about being delusional!!!!!!!!!
“Out In the Street” - Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band
I recently read Warren Zanes’ excellent book, Deliver Me Nowhere, about the incredibly fucking depressing, not a summer song in sight Nebraska. But before there was Nebraska, as Zanes diligently covers in his book, there was The River, an album that absolutely rips. Every song on The River is a song of summer—songs meant to be played in baseball stadiums and giant amphitheaters with sweaty strangers swigging cold beer. “Out In the Street” in particular is a song of summer in that it meets the genre’s criteria of being (a) a little dirtbag running around town with your friends and (b) horny.
“Mae” - Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
It’s giving you’re making a dinner that is really just a glorified charcuterie and crudite board for one but pretending you’re in a Nancy Meyer’s movie throwing a dinner party on your patio for all your friends and loved ones on a perfect summer night. There are strings of twinkly paper lanterns and candles burning even though there are no bugs to keep away and obviously no rats and the air is nice and breezy—cool enough to wear a little cream colored cardigan that you will not spill anything on—and there’s lots of laughter and cold drinks and everyone is happy and no one is sad :’)
“Monkey Time/Dancing in the Street” - Laura Nyro and LaBelle
Every song on Gonna Take a Miracle is a perfect summer song. This one makes me feel like I am Vada Sultenfuss in My Girl but without the dead mom or friend who is going to be stung by a million bees and die before summer ends, a platonic ideal of a summer, I am sorry to say, I still fantasize about having—along with the summer of Now and Then—even though I am a 32 year old woman with a full time day job.
“Jesse” (Live from Grand Central Station) - Carly Simon
Summer is about having a regrettable crush and no one knows regrettable love better than Miss Carly Simon!
“There Goes the Neighborhood” (Live from Central Park) - Sheryl Crow and Friends
WHY DON’T ADULT CONTEMPORARY POP STARS PLAY HUGE CONCERTS IN CENTRAL PARK ANYMORE!!!!!!!!!!! Do not send me the link to this year’s Summerstage lineup, I am simply not interested in any of this year’s bookings enough to pay that much money for a ticket and also I’m talking about GREAT LAWN CONCERTS THAT ARE NOT WHATEVER THE GLOBAL CITIZEN FESTIVAL IS AND/OR THE COVID IS OVER 2021 CONCERT THAT GOT, APPROPRIATELY, CANCELED AN HOUR IN BY A SUPERSTORM!!!!!
“Put Down the Duckie” - Ernie and Hoots the Owl
I am absolutely not kidding when I say this song is perfect: A sonic treatise on the sacrifices one must make to pursue one’s art, a slyly jovial argument that self-discipline (something that seems to go out the door the second it’s nice out), though it may be uncomfortable, is not antithetical to joy but a tool which enables us to find true pleasure when rid of the din of distraction. There is simply no excuse for summertime sadness when it is available on multiple streaming platforms to blast at full volume! Don’t even get me started on the All-Star Version!!!2
“Movin’ Right Along” - Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog
It’s about road trips! It’s about good times with your friends! It’s about independence! It’s about dedication to a good time! It’s about the hottest Muppet flexing his charisma! It’s girls who can’t drive (or can but choose not to because it gives them such bad anxiety) canon!
“The Farmer’s Daughter” (Live 1980) - Fleetwood Mac
I can’t leave this list without a Fleetwood Mac cut. Here they are covering the Beach Boys and giving simply stunning, angelic harmonies, which is wild considering they were all probably in a five way screaming match like ten minutes before they recorded this. I never make a summer playlist without it.
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okay that's it that's the end thanks love u bye
okay wow really getting off to a great start here!!! i have excellent music taste, sorry!!!
well, actually, you can get me started, briefly, on the all star version: paul simon!? gladys knight!? wynton marsalis!? john candy!? andrea martin!? madeline kahn?! itzhak perlman!? phil donahue!? jeremy irons!???? ladysmith black mambazo!??? and this is a short list!!! are you kidding me!!!!???