Words and Guitar, Vol. 11: Summer’s End

The eleventh and final entry in a weekly column by Terence Cawley.

So this is going to be my last Words and Guitar column. I want to thank my good friend Ben Stas one more time for giving me this opportunity, and I also want to thank all five of my readers (just a guess, the actual number may be lower) for your kind attention. While I have thoroughly enjoyed indulging my deepest music nerdery for the last three months, I am about to start grad school this fall, and frankly, I don’t think I’ll be able to justify the time I sink into this column every week at that point. Maybe I’ll write something else for Noise Floor one of these days, but until then, at least we’ll have our memories of this strange summer we spent together. Which brings us to this week’s column:

Top 5 End-of-Summer Songs

The end of summer has proven to be a rich subject for songwriters. The time of year comes with a baked-in melancholy to which anyone who’s been a kid dreading the end of vacation and the start of school, or who’s lived in a part of the world where the weather starts getting colder as September rolls around, can relate. When I was in middle school and high school, I made a tradition out of listening to my favorite album, The Shins’ Wincing the Night Away (last time I’ll talk about this band/album in this column, I swear!), every year on the last day of summer. So for me, the ultimate end-of-summer song will always be that record’s closing track, “A Comet Appears.” A resigned exhalation ending with the fatalistic lines “Still to come, the worst part and you know it/There is a numbness in your heart and it’s growing,” there’s nothing summer-specific about the song, but its mortality-obsessed ruminations still felt apropos, for what does the end of summer signify if not the unforgiving passage of time?

Still, for this list I tried to keep it to songs that were more explicitly about the summer’s end. Let’s get into it, one last time!

5. Yo La Tengo – “The Summer,” from Fakebook (1990)

Fake Yo La Tengo fan alert: I don’t think I’ve listened to any of their pre-Painful albums, including Fakebook, in full (though I’m downloading them on Spotify now, so it will happen at some point!). But I know this track, one of the few originals on what is mostly a covers album, from their compilation Prisoners of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs: 1985-2003, which is mostly notable for managing the rare feat of squeezing two colons into one title.

Like a lot of indie rock bands, including the one who claimed the top spot on this list, Yo La Tengo’s default mood could be described as “autumnal,” though I may just subconsciously associate them with that season because their signature song is called “Autumn Sweater.” On the other hand, they also have an album called Summer Sun. So it makes sense that they’d be able to evoke the liminal space between the two seasons with a short and simple, mostly-acoustic tune in which Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley harmonize sweetly about wasting time wandering the streets at night “’till the summer comes undone.” It’s a sentiment which gets at a fundamental truth about summer vacation: it’s always a little boring by the end, and you’re always secretly a little relieved when it’s over.

4. John Prine – “Summer’s End,” from The Tree of Forgiveness (2018)

This may be a slightly sentimental pick on my part. John Prine’s passing in April, back in the terrifying early weeks of the pandemic, hit a lot of people really hard. Prine’s wise, compassionate songs had a way of worming into your heart and setting up permanent residence there. Fortunately, Prine experienced a good portion of that love in his lifetime, as 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, his first album of new material in 13 years and sadly his last, sparked an outpouring of affection for the American treasure. “Summer’s End” came with a music video tying its themes of regret and loss to the opioid epidemic, adding yet another layer of sadness to a quietly moving acoustic reflection that would be plenty heartbreaking even without all the context.

3. Stevie Wonder – “Summer Soft,” from Songs in the Key of Life (1976)

Stevie Wonder’s public persona has always been predicated on love, joy, and that iconic, million-watt smile, but the man could also write a sorrowful lament with the best of them. One of the more underrated album cuts on the classic double album Songs in the Key of Life, “Summer Soft” uses the fleeting nature of seasons as a metaphor for friends and romantic partners leaving without warning, starting with a light piano figure and slowly building in intensity as the betrayals pile up, until finally Wonder is shouting “And she’s gone! Summer’s gone!” as the organ wails along and the groove intensifies. Even when Wonder was in the throes of despair, his passion for music shone through, making “Summer Soft” the rare end-of-summer song you can kind of dance to.

2. Devon Welsh – “Summer’s End,” from Dream Songs (2018)

I already wrote about this song when I reviewed the former Majical Cloudz singer’s debut solo album for The Boston Globe, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. Revisiting “Summer’s End” for the first time since Dream Songs came out in 2018, I am struck by a line that didn’t stand out to me initially: “And this is not the first time/We’ve seen the last, the last of the green.” Most songs about the end of summer focus on what is lost; what makes “Summer’s End” stand out is how it also takes a moment to zoom out and remind the listener that yes, summer will be back next year, just like it came back this year and the year before that. It is that ability to seamlessly mix aching sadness and tenaciously clung-to hope into one instantly recognizable emotion that has made Welsh such a singular, special artist.

1. Death Cab for Cutie – “Summer Skin,” from Plans (2005)

Ben Gibbard returns to the end-of-summer theme so frequently that I could have filled this whole list with songs of his if I wanted to. Most obviously, there’s “Summer Years,” from Death Cab for Cutie’s latest album, 2018’s Thank You For Today, along with his solo cover of Beat Happening’s “Indian Summer,” though that song’s title refers to the perhaps-problematically-titled phenomenon of summer-like weather occurring in fall. “Summer Skin” is my favorite of the bunch, and on some days it might even be my favorite Death Cab song.

“Summer Skin” is the only song on Plans for which Death Cab drummer Jason McGerr gets a writing credit, and he deserves it; his drum rolls give the otherwise ethereal song a firm backbone, without which it might float away into nothingness. Nick Harmer’s bass line also merits recognition, arguably bearing even more of the melodic burden than Gibbard’s plaintive piano chords. It’s a true full-band effort, one where all of the elements cohere just right to provide the perfect backdrop for Gibbard’s memories of a summer love which ended with the changing of the leaves. If “then Labor Day came and went/And we shed what was left of our summer skin” didn’t make the point clear enough, “And I knew your heart I couldn’t win/’Cause the season’s change was a conduit/And we’d left our love in our summer skin” should do the trick. A little overdramatic in its collegiate angst and quarter-life nostalgia? Sure- it wouldn’t be Death Cab if it wasn’t. But even if you’ve never had a summer fling, the core feeling of “Summer Skin” is one just about all of us have experienced, if only for a week or two a year, and Death Cab honor that feeling by admitting how much it can hurt.

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A bit of a down note on which to end what’s generally been a pretty silly endeavor, I suppose. Still, as always, I had fun writing it, and I hope you had fun reading it. Enjoy the Spotify playlist, and I’ll see you when I see you.