Hey. Here’s a brilliant song called “That Summer Feeling” by Modern Lovers founder and lead singer Jonathan Richman. It’s from his 1992 album I, Jonathan. Listen to it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQv8gfJjAVI

Modern Lovers fans will be well acquainted with Richman’s wonderfully honest and insightful sense of humor. This song gives one a good idea of Richman’s voice and writing style, as he offers his fascinating (and pretty true) perspective on the emotional relationship we tend to have with summer and the past in general. This song’s slow, relaxed pace and simple instrumentation (guitars and percussion) immediately evoke that feeling of summer that we all know and love. It makes you want to go to the beach and watch the sunset with your friends or walk to the park with your dog or buy a Slurpee or get your tan on in the backyard or something. It’s a pretty nice feeling that I certainly long for most of the year when it’s cloudy and I have to write papers and sign things and send people important emails.

But then Richman complicates this feeling. He sings: “That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life”. Instead of simply equating “that summer feeling” with pure happiness and love and all those good things, Richman adds feelings of nostalgia, regret, and bitterness into the mix. Is it healthy to long for summers of the past with such fervor? Richman’s idea of “that summer feeling” almost begins to seem more like a drug than anything else: “It’s gonna haunt you / It’s gonna taunt you / You’re gonna want this feeling inside / One more time”. Then he urges the listener to ask him or herself whether he or she is glorifying the past beyond how it actually was and, if so, is this really a good thing to do?

For me, every summer is better than the last. And often my wish to go back to the last summer tends to suffocate my ability to look forward to the future. Furthermore, I have a hard time not thinking of the year in terms of school and summer, even now that I’m in college, when I should instead simply enjoy each day and not worry about the past. Richman calls attention to this issue and warns the listener not to get too caught up in the past. That’s not to say that the summer isn’t wonderful; Richman portrays many wonderful images of summer, including catamarans, Oldsmobiles, swing sets, lawns, ponds, etc.

There seems to be a vicious cycle here: we spend so much time wishing that we could relive some past experience that we fail to fully enjoy the present, and then once those times when we were longing for the past are behind us, we tend to glorify them and long for them, too. Maybe this isn’t true. I occasionally try to remind myself that happiness does not come from mentally reliving (and inevitably fictionalizing) our pasts but instead from enjoying where we are now and where we are headed.

The weather’s been nice recently. Get outside.

-DJYT

Jonathan Richman