The Complete Works of Summer

Collect 'em all!

Every now and then we’d hear our song

“All Summer Long,” B. Wilson, M. Love

Every summer has a soundtrack by which it is preserved, and endures, in memory; the association of a song with its particular summer can outlast countless subsequent listenings at other seasons, in later years. When I hear The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” The Commodores’ “Three Times A Lady,” Toto’s “Hold the Line,” or Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça Plane Pour Moi,’’ it’s 1978, and I’m lying on a towel at my neighborhood pool in Columbia, MD, beside somebody’s transistor radio, or riding in someone’s back seat down Route 29, headed for Georgetown, hoping to find out how to dress (though never to be) cool at a joint on Wisconsin Avenue called Commander Salamander. The Human League’s “Fascination”: Summer 1983. Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”: Summer 1988.

But a summer’s soundtrack is never limited merely to its hit songs, or even to those that are released, that are played or overplayed, that May-June-July-August-into-September. There are the old favorites and standbys that emerge from a summer’s particular set of friends, and their various music collections or road-trip mixtapes; the songs that make up the personal-fave playlist of a summertime romance; that embed themselves by chance in the amber of a summer moment; that are introduced or revived by the soundtrack of a summer movie, songs that seem to stalk and shadow, to haunt and happen to turn up.

It was my old friend Alan Acosta, with a “Summer ’89” mixtape, who introduced me to the heady notion that one could, as it were, engineer a summer’s soundtrack in advance, crafted from a mixture of recent releases and old favorites. Keep it in the car cassette deck, dub copies for the friends you plan to hang out with, and see what happens. Two such mixtapes of my own have survived to make it into the Handmade Playlists collection, and they are the first two in this Complete Works of Summer set. (I don’t know what became of my “Summer ’93” mixtape. I know it must be around here someplace…)

Summer ’92

The oldest, and currently the only Handmade Playlist to have originated as an actual, edited-in-the-dual-deck-boombox cassette tape (the original even featured a few tracks taped off the radio!), I made this one while living alone in a rented summer house in Taconic, New York, after the collapse of my first marriage and, more recently, my first post-divorce relationship. I was only 28, it was early May, and as ever in those days I felt like I was standing on the brink not only of a brand-new summer but of a brand-new world, a brand-new life. About a week after I finished making it—compiling and cuing a mixtape, by the way, was a huge pain in the ass—I took the train down to New York City for a blind date with a freshly-minted young attorney named Ayelet Waldman, who became the recipient of “Summer ’92”’s first dub.

Summer 2000

It was, to quote GZA quoting Shogun Assassin, a dark time for the empire. In late April, a brand-new life, a brand-new world, came to an end when a bad amnio in the eighteenth week of pregnancy turned up an abnormality in the chromosomes of a baby whose older brother, then 2.5, had already named Rocketship. I vaguely recall having made this one as almost an act of defiance, in the hope of salvaging or regaining some feeling of summertime by reviving the practice of making a summer mixtape (the first one I ever created by means of ripping and burning CDs). Thanks to the presence of some wonderful songs, we did find a little comfort, now and then, in listening to “Summer 2000”—in the joyfulness and humor, for example, of the two opening tracks. Listening to this one now, it all comes back for me, and after a quarter-century and two more beautiful children, the bitterness has all, somehow, turned bittersweet. But when I hear “A Simple Kind of Life”—my vote for Gwen Stefani’s best-written, definitely her saddest, song—I remember walking down Lewiston Street here in Berkeley that summer, pushing poor Rocketship’s big brother in his stroller, their older sister (then 5) holding onto my belt loop with a finger, the hot July day blazing bright everywhere else around us, feeling lost in the deep, intense shade of its big, old plane trees. All that summer’s darkness is in that song.

Blowin’ Through The Jasmine In My Mind

Inevitably, then, summer soundtracks and the songs that comprise them become entangled with memory, but entering the streaming era, with access to the Entirety of All Musical Creation Ever, I discovered that I could generate a kind of collective musical evocation of summertime by, for instance, sampling tracks that spanned an entire more-or-less coherent era of my life—my 1970s childhood and youth, for example. “Blowin’ Through The Jasmine In My Mind'“ is the earlier of two such “summer vibe-aggregate” playlists. It features not only songs that were released or received heavy airplay during their respective summers but that also, to my memory’s ear, seem to echo, to encode the sonic ambience of East Coast summertime itself, like the rhythmic whine of cicadas, the humming of bees in the azaleas, August thunderclaps, the whirr of bicycle spokes: songs that all seem to share a certain plangency of summer. Pop music in the 1970s was very good at plangent.

The Summer’s Gone And I Hope She’s Feeling The Same

I narrowed the focus, with this one, trying to hone in on the vibe of a specific, aggregate moment in the sonic history of those same summers: their collective End. Summer’s end is as poignant and bittersweet as its beginning is filled with promise, and once I started digging around, first in my memory, then in the pop charts, I found that a surprising number of the most wistful-sounding, and hence wistful-feeling, summertime songs I could think of from those days actually had been released, or had begun their journeys to the top of the charts, toward the late-middle and end of summer, often peaking, perfectly, with the fall.

Summerhaze

A lot of the Handmade Playlists do nothing more than chase a vibe, across years, across periods and styles and sub-genres, trying to catch hold, and then hopefully generate, a particular sonic idea, or mood. For me, the pleasure of assembling such a playlist is in that chase, and in the precision of the standard I bring to bear in deciding, in evaluating candidate tracks to see if they really belong—if they help generate and sustain the vibe; in arguing with myself, changing my mind, changing it again, quibbling and fact-checking; in exclusion as much as in inclusion. Right now in my Spotify “In Progress” folder there are certain vibes I’ve been chasing for more than a decade, but this playlist came together, satisfyingly, over a couple of days in the summer of 2023.