My song of the summer came out last October
what makes a perfect summer song? plus two playlists for you
Summer kind of sneaks up on you in Southern California. For a while you’re ensconced in June gloom1 every morning, sipping hot coffee and noticing that suddenly your whole feed is people drinking Aperol spritzes in Italy while wearing sort of ugly La Dolce Vita cosplay. As for me, I prefer the Midwest to Europe in the summer, which sounds like a cope and surely partially is, but you know what? I love ample ice, the joyful and twisted Americana that reveals itself in seasonal events like country fairs and rodeos, and also innovations in deep frying. Next week I’ll be going to Kansas City for a week and am really looking forward to it. If you have any recs for me, please drop them in the comments! An antique mall hates to see me coming (hide your kids, hide your charming 50s ceramic salt and pepper shakers).
Speaking of summer - I wrote a short piece about my experience at Lollapalooza 1995 for the excellent The Print Edition (thank you David Coggins!) and now I am somehow published in the same issue as Graydon Carter. I love physical media, I love print, I love collecting things to stack on tables in my home, and I love The Print Edition. Get the issue at their website or at select newsstands.
This morning the thought occurred to me in a particularly languid moment that cherries are certainly proof of god, and that’s when it hit me: it’s definitely summer now. Driving home from hot yoga I ate the complimentary electrolyte popsicle I was given (thank you Silver Springs) with the windows down, cranked the volume on the Subaru, and listened to what is revealing itself to be if not the song of the summer, certainly my song of the summer, “When I’m Not Around” by Deep Heaven, five times in a row. Yes this song did come out in the fall of 2025, thank you for asking. You gotta kill the cop within, babe.
The thing about a perfect summer song is that it needs to be buoyant and life-affirming but also have woven into it a thin, gossamer thread of sorrow, because this is also what makes summer so wonderful (and the bowl of cherries transcendent). It’s the knowledge that it will all soon enough be over. It will once again be dark at 5pm, the stone fruit will disappear from the farmers markets, and people will have to pack up their nap dresses and off-the-shoulder poplin peasant blouses and come back home.
Obviously the threat is less serious when you live in Los Angeles, but even though we don’t suffer from particularly punitive winters here (though I maintain that a cold January night in LA is somehow more bone-chilling than one in Minnesota, for example), it’s about the tenor of the season. The carefree mood will always give way to something heavier. And for my two cents, that impermanence needs to be hinted at in the music that carries you through the season, sun on your face, wind at your back while you bike a little drunk off white wine spritzes, or slip your bare arm out the car window and make little waves with your hand up against the thick air. There has to be a tiny bit of mourning undergirding the joy. Lana Del Rey obviously snapped with “Summertime Sadness,” a particularly overt example of this. “Pumped Up Kicks” is about a homicidal teenager! You see what I mean.
A few other songs of MY summer include:
charli xcx "Rock Music” (I am the #1 “Rock Music” truther, I love it so much)
After the jump, I have for you a playlist of 40 gorgeous summer songs (contemporary). There’s like 25% overlap with my top songs of 2026 because I am HONEST and I like what I like. But most of it is new (to you, via me at least). There’s also an old playlist I made but never shared that I called “Goth at the Beach” for some reason (no Growlers). It’s 3 hours long and has songs from four decades and is kind of fab? Hope you like them both: