August, Track 2: Untitled (Love Song)

The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings will be more focused on the songs than others, and this is all vague enough in general that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We’re finding out. Today, we’re onto Track 2.

Side A

1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey

Side B

6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale

***

In Track 1, on Monday, we wrote about my terrible summer. It’s ok to have a terrible summer, but I hope you haven’t had one, and if you have, and if this is beneficial, I hope today’s song can give you a five-minute escape.

I do love Counting Crows, as regular readers know and as the name “The Barking Crow” hints (the short version is that no, the site isn’t directly named after Counting Crows, but the crow affinity would not exist without that band). So yes, three of the eleven August songs on here are Counting Crows songs. To be fair, though, they at least didn’t write this one. It’s a cover. The Romany Rye performed it first.

***

More than any other season, summer impresses upon you its brevity. In many ways, it’s longer than the other seasons, but I recall as a child getting done with the busy first half of basketball camp and swimming lessons and Little League baseball and looking up halfway through July with a shock to see that August was just a few weeks away, knowing August meant our family vacation followed by school. It’s a fleeting thing, summer, and as the season when we’re most out of place, many of its tidings can be recognized, actively, in the moment, as not-to-last.

I think this is part of summer’s joy, and not in a “savor it because it’s leaving” sense. I think summer, at its best, inspires us to live presently—so presently that we become unaware that it is leaving.

This song is not unaware of summer’s departure. This song’s all about summer’s departure.

I was driving up Dole Avenue, listening to XRT. I must not have been in a hurry, because I sat at the light instead of doing the Pingree-to-Pomeroy cut-through that gets you to Central or to Crystal Lake Avenue quicker if there’s a red. The song started as I was rolling to a stop.

It was a summer afternoon. I don’t remember which month. The sun was shining and the leaves were that rich green they get in the summer sun and I had the Taurus’s windows down. I had recently graduated high school. I don’t know where I was going, but I believe it was an afternoon, and I don’t remember feeling the deadened-ness that would accompany me home from that particular summer job, which makes me think it was either the beginning or the end of summer, before I’d started or before I’d finished work at the high school.

Adam Duritz’s voice caught me. I couldn’t place the song. It turned out, as the DJ said after the song had concluded, that it was from their new album—the cover album, this was 2012—but for a few minutes, I sat there wondering if I was misrecognizing Duritz’s voice or if, as turned out to be the case, I’d missed something.

There’s no transformative story attaching the song to my life. Just this simple one, a story of summer, which is good, because the song is one of a simple summer. In every summer, every good one, there are things we grab hold of which we don’t wish to let go.

Throw your arms around my neck.
I won’t be soon to forget.

Of course, in so many instances we do forget. In even more instances we do let go. But the brevity, again, establishes its wall somewhere amidst August (or in certain phases of life or in certain places in America, somewhere in September or somewhere in late July). We see the wall. We grab hold of the things we wish to take with us. In the best of summers, we grab hold of the summer itself. And we fly headlong toward the wall, ready for our hold to be broken, but holding on anyway.

Summers are not absolute. This is true in many senses, but relevantly true here in the sense that summers most often contain, like all of life, things we wish to let go and things we do not wish to let go. Either way, of course, we’re letting much of it go. But as Track 1 dwelt on the things we wanted to leave behind and couldn’t, Track 2, today, deals with the things we’d like to carry on, but cannot.

Here it is: