Summer Songs

Once I was gifted a mix, and it was the soundtrack to the best summer of my life. Marine biology, two weeks in Tokyo and the one were just forming in front of me.

Listening to that mix was a transporting swell, a wave that fell into me and then out of my hands in such manic happiness, and this morning I remembered it wrong and somehow added on other songs that never even existed in the same space. Good memories are like that for me. They bleed into each other, pooling in a long strand of endorphins that can't be separated.

The songs just felt like grass and the pool, long days and elbows out of car windows, star-studded nights and barefoot running in someone else's driveway. Wearing a bathing suit at all times just in case, throwing tomatoes at the dog, popping a new can of tennis balls, the smell of wood chips and washing the car by hand.

My summer songs today, in no particular order, which do not go together at all, and don't even have to do with the same summer would be:

Mew “Zookeeper's Boy”

Modest Mouse “Never ending Math Equation”

Built to Spill “Carry the Zero”

Sufjan Stevens "Chicago"

Pinback “Loro”

Neko Case “Deep Red Bells”

Summer at Shatter Creek “Home for the Holidays”

Sun Kil Moon “Carry Me Ohio”

Dr. Dog’s cover of “Heart it Races”

Wilco “Company in My Back”

Animal Collective "Leaf House"

Editors "Munich"

Rogue Wave "Publish My Love"

Junior Boys "First Time"

The Knife's version of "Heartbeats"

And lastly, Royksapp "Eple", the unheard anthem of that weekend in Lake Como, where we got lost, and found a baby donkey and pet it until its mother shooed us away...


What are yours?