Category Archives: Music

When we were young I thought I needed the bombast.

Maybe I did.

Maybe I needed the driving guitars, the wall of sound, the driving noise, and the rush and wail of the original version of this song. Back then it carried the power to pull me away from the ledge, and perhaps that’s precisely the drastic and bombastic shove which saved me, something to jolt and shock and force myself into any other state than the one in which I simply wanted to cease existing. That sort of mindset requires a bigger bang than the orchestral song you are about to hear here. Necessary for its time and purpose in life, and long fallen by the wayside in favor of something more sustainable and reasonable. 

These days, I am finding more meaning and resonance in a quieter mode of living. When you’ve had a proper thrashing when you’re young, and lived a few crazy years of fun and wildness, you can have your mid-life crisis, embrace it, and hopefully come out on the other side a bit better for all of it. 

“Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him –the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream.” ~ Colin Harrison

Every time I feel that I might be moving beyond this pocket of danger, and that others in my orbit are safe too, something happens that reminds me we are not quite fifty, not quite to the shore yet. Even the most seemingly-innocuous storm could be the one to take us out – to sea, to loss, to regret, to worse… And I wonder if there will ever be a safe day, a day or time when we can simply relax, let down our guards, and be. I wonder and I hope… and I listen to this song called ‘Tomorrow‘. 

Today in the garden the very last Japanese iris bloomed – through the afternoon storm, and unexpectedly, as I had thought their blooms were already done. This one must have hidden itself in the fading remnants of its predecessors, tricking me into thinking the display was over when really there was one day more of beauty. That’s the magic of a tomorrow – you never know what might show up and bloom for you. 

The rain came down the rain came down
The rain came down on me
The wind blew strong and summer’s song
Fades to memory

I knew you when i loved you then
In summer’s yawn now helpless
You laid me bare you marked me there
The promises we made…

The first time I ever watched the George Cukor classic ‘The Women’ was on a lazy summer day, when it was too hot to stay outside, so I flipped through the channels of the television and this black and white movie came on TCM. Knowing it had inspired various fashion designers over the years, I settled in for the afternoon and watched the travails of Mary Haines and her female cohorts (with one of my favorites, Rosalind Russell, battling Joan Crawford for a meal of scenery). The bottle of perfume that forms a pivotal plot point for discovery was named ‘Summer Rain’, a name that has gone largely forgotten in favor of the more pointedly named ‘Jungle Red’ nail polish. 

Tonight we are being deluged by rain, and so I was put in mind of the movie, and this song, which has nothing to do with the movie, but is from a summer-themed album ‘Reveal’ by R.E.M. That collection contained the more-overtly-related ‘Summer Turns to High‘ and the glorious ‘Imitation of Life‘. 

I used to think as birds take wing
They sing through life so why can’t we?
We cling to this and claim the best
If this is what you’re offering
I’ll take the rain i’ll take the rain

The nighttime creases summer schemes
And stretches out to stay
The sun shines down you came around
You loved the easy days but now the sun
The winter’s come i wanted just to say
That if I hold i’d hoped you’d fold
Open up inside, inside of me

Most of the favored songs for summer are upbeat and effervescent and hopeful. That’s what summer is supposed to be – sunny and light and airy. That leaves out the darker underside, and somehow the more beautiful and somber shades of summer. It’s here in this song, here on this rainy evening, in which I take my own version of ‘Summer Rain’ down from the shelf, ‘Un Jardin Apres la Mousson’ by Hermes – which translates to a garden after the Monsoon – and spray a little on before bed. 

Far from waking from thunder, I’ve always slept better during the rain, in or out of Hermes. 

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.

Summer often opens portals to the past, leading us down corridors of memory where the scent of a peony or mockorange stuns us into our youth again. It’s a gloriously disconcerting thing when it happens, nostalgia mingled with yearning, mourning coupled with celebratory glee – all that once was now finished and over, and only the memories of certain events and feelings remain, growing ever-faded by each passing year.

Fever dream high in the quiet of the night
You know that I caught it
Bad, bad boy
Shiny toy with a price
You know that I bought it

Killing me slow, out the window
I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more

Summer seems to hit differently that way, our memories somehow more succinct and holding more powerful sway over our present than anything we might recall from a cold stale winter. Maybe they mean more and last longer because we want summer to do the same. All that drama is neatly encapsulated in this simple pop song by Taylor Swift rather tritely entitled ‘Cruel Summer’.

And it’s new, the shape of your body
It’s blue, the feeling I’ve got
And it’s ooh, whoa, oh
It’s a cruel summer
It’s cool, that’s what I tell ’em
No rules in breakable heaven
But ooh, whoa oh
It’s a cruel summer
With you

Many a Swiftie considers the bridge in ‘Cruel Summer’ to be one of her best, and my niece confirmed this as she all but shouted out the lyrics when it hit. (Not sure how much experience a 13-year-old has had being drunk in the backseat of a car, but I’m getting ahead of myself.) The notion of summer being cruel has long been a delicious juxtaposition of the sunny season and anything that happens to go wrong during that time. (And there is more than one song that takes the ‘Cruel Summer’ title.) I too adore that kind of tension – it lends a gravitas to summer that its more celebrated lightness and frivolity tends to obscure.

Hang your head low
In the glow of the vending machine
I’m not dying
You say that we’ll just screw it up in these trying times
We’re not trying

So cut the headlights, summer’s a knife
I’m always waiting for you just to cut to the bone
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
And if I bleed, you’ll be the last to know

Swift adds her own brand of melodrama to a season that often comes rife with enough drama of its own, heightening the effect with images of summer nights and misguided obsessions, sneaking through garden gates and blissfully diving into mistakes with heated abandon. Summer provides the necessary backdrop, and occasional impetus, for all of it to happen, and looking back at summers past we’ve all indulged in such folly and foolishness, such as squeezing into a blue Speedo and baking our skin in the midday sun. Those foibles are silly and minor when you contrast them with the deliberate ransacking of one’s heart, all in an effort to make one summer mean more than it might genuinely merit. Summers can be as much like knives as they are like people – variable, sharp, cutting – and embodying a diabolical beauty and sinister elegance. They can burn or hiss or soothe or wimper, crackling with dry heat or smoldering with fetid humidity. The heat does something to the passion that gets unleashed in the coming months. It messes with the mind. It clouds the judgment. It hazes the sight. Midsummer madness is much more than mere alliteration.

I’m drunk in the back of the car
And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar (oh)
Said, “I’m fine, ” but it wasn’t true
I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you
And I snuck in through the garden gate
Every night that summer just to seal my fate (oh)
And I screamed for whatever it’s worth
“I love you, ” ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?
He looks up grinning like a devil…

A single line of sweat, started by a single bead of liquid, spills down the body, tickling and invoking an involuntary arching of the back. A bumblebee buzzes by in lumbering flight, its fuzzy body dusted by pretty pollen. A wailing cicada ticks away the midpoint of the day. Heat emanates from everywhere, even the shaded spaces, and eventually there is nowhere that provides respite. This is the summer we need. This is the summer we want. This is cruel in the best possible way.

With a new album and tour, the Jonas Brothers are all sorts of busy for the next few months, bringing their fans to a frothing tizzy thanks to a successful maturations that most ‘boy bands’ don’t usually achieve. That may be due to their genuine musical talent and knack at writing a decent song, and the ‘boy band’ label might be an unjust one if we take it to mean the usual manufactured pretty boys thrown together to please a wide demographic. No such contrived machinations hinder these brothers, so feel free to indulge in their music with gusto. 

The family has been featured here a few times, such as in this ultra-cool post on ‘Sucker’. Their way around a catchy pop-tune finds proof in this underwear-clad moment for ‘What A Man Gotta Do’. And for those who want to suck on some more, check out this post. 

{See also Joe Jonas getting sexy, and Nick Jonas staying hot.}