Summer Days Driftin' Away: 5 Songs for Summer Nights

This week's songs are from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Fly Golden Eagle, The Drifters, Thin Lizzy, and Yo La Tengo

The Fourth of July holiday is Peak Summer. Parties and barbeques and days off of work and beaches and pools and baseball. People fit as much summer-specific activity as possible into what is effectively a long weekend. The back half of summer is for vacations—when the weather is Peak Summer: heat, humidity, evening thunderstorms. With people out of town, it gets noticeably a little quieter around town. Although the days start to get shorter, it feels like they stretch a little bit longer. Maybe I just want to get more out of them. Summer habits have set in, the kids stay outside a little bit later.

What I’m getting at is July and August nights are the best. Sitting out in the yard, on a porch, being out on the town, or out of town. There is something magical about a Late-Summer evening.

Here are 5 songs that make me think of summer nights.

“the darkness doesn't need the light
All the young are getting old and the summer is cold
And all the birds have been singing at night” - Lord Huron, “The Birds Are Singing at Night”

Ladysmith Black Mambazo - “Mbayimbayi”

Ladysmith Black Mambazo had recorded 25 albums before Paul Simon went to South Africa and recorded them for Graceland. The vocal group sings in a distinctive a cappella style called isicathamiya, which originated among the Zulu in labor camps in the 1920s. But you can know nothing about them, or what they’re singing about and it still a powerful and incredibly calming music. A lead tenor guides a choir of close, but highly complex harmonies with a few repetitive sequences.

When I was in high school, I worked at Ravinia, a summer music festival that hosted classical, jazz, and occasional pop acts (who were usually all past their prime). They also had a small 200-seat theater for chamber groups, where on Mondays smaller concerts were hosted, which they would occasionally broadcast out to the lawn. On those nights, my job was sit about 50 yards from the theater and close a gate once an hour when a train came by on the nearby tracks. When I think about how much fun that job was, I always go back to the night Ladysmith Black Mambazo played the theater and their incredible voices filled the mostly empty fairgrounds. Listening to them now I can put myself back in that folding chair and see the wind blowing through the trees. And to think, I was getting paid to do this…

“You're like a cold beer, darling, on a long hot summer night.” - Rod Stewart, “Delicious”

Fly Golden Eagle - “Psyche’s Dagger”

This one’s a different kind of romantic. It’s basically that overconfident, somehow charming drunk goofball hitting on a woman at a house party—and it’s working. A couple things about this groovy banger remind me of summer. First, there is the goofy fun (and the trappings) of hanging out on back porches on hot and sticky nights, chatting up people you barely know at house parties in your 20s. Then there’s hot and sticky concrete of a Chicago block party, where I watched Fly Golden Eagle rip this jam while wearing bulky cardigans and knit caps in 90 degree weather. My fellow Chicagoans with any kind of recall can likely place themselves in very similar situations, and this song takes me right back.

“The moon is swimming naked and the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief.” - Leonard Cohen, “Closing Time”

The Drifters - “Up On the Roof”

I’ve mentioned previously why I associate Oldies with summer. But there’s also the distinct joy of being on a roof on a summer night—this song covers both of those things. Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, produced by Leiber & Stoller, and exquisitely performed by the Drifters, it would be difficult to name a better team to do any one of those things—but here they all are together. It’s a classic songwriting formula as well: name a person, place, or thing and then sing about the emotional universe around it.

I can think of any number of summer nights spent on a roof: an Astronomy assignment in college, friends’ rooftop decks watching Fourth of July fireworks, watching our neighbors set off fireworks during the big DIY Fourth of July in 2020—alarmed as debris rained down on top of us—and even taking a break from a recording session to have a beer on top of an industrial building in West Humboldt Park and getting an amazing view of the Chicago skyline at night. It’s not so much the thrill of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be. It’s more that you’re someplace outside of the ordinary, getting a vantage point available to a chosen few. I’m afraid of heights, but there’s something amazing about being up on a roof, and this song captures it.

“I've hawked all my yesterdays, don't try and change my tune
'Cause I thought I heard a saxophone, I'm drunk on the moon” - Tom Waits, “Drunk on the Moon”

Thin Lizzy - “Dancing in the Moonlight”

There’s the right amount of swing in this track to give it the sleezy atmosphere of a hot, sticky over-served walk home.

“It's three o'clock in the morning
And I'm on the streets again
I disobeyed another warning
I should've been in by ten”

There’s something so specific about Thin Lizzy’s sound, and trying to pin it down I’m grasping at something about all of it—the tinny guitar, the frayed and flat snare sound, a bass so smooth you barely notice it, Phil Lynott’s infinitely cool voice, the great sing-along harmonies of the chorus, the economy with which all of those things come together. But it’s the loose feel of “Dancing in the Moonlight” that makes the song. It’s got such a jazzy groove, it could slide into fellow Irishman Van Morrison’s catalogue undetected—at least until that Les Paul solo starts shredding.

“Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom
July is dressed up and playing her tune
And I come home from a hard day's work
And you're waiting there, not a care in the world” - Seals & Crofts “Summer Breeze”

Yo La Tengo - “Green Arrow”

Yo La Tengo has been around as long as I’ve been alive. People with opinions I respect love this band, and I’ve had trouble getting on board. Every so often I look for a way in and never make it very far. That said, there are gems that stay in my rotation, and “Green Arrow” is one of them. It’s a pause. An exhale. Absolutely serene. While making it, whoever said, “this could use some crickets,” was an inspired genius. And in a description I wish I could take credit for but can’t, I saw someone describe the shakers as sounding “like sprinklers on a baseball field in the dead of night.” A summer night doesn’t get more peaceful than that. Near-silent preparation for all the possibilities of another summer day.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening.

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