Summer Songs

It's been a long time since I was in tune with the zeitgeist on summer songs. Last summer? I think I heard "Crazy" once. This summer I'm a little more with it: Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, and "Umbrella" will always make me think of the summer of 2007, and if Wilco counts as a certain corner of the zeitgeist, well, everyone knows how I feel about Sky Blue Sky.

But really for me this summer is about two songs, "Purple People" and "Wagon Wheel."

[Just have to say that this post is causing me anonymity angst. Really my anonymity is a ridiculous schtick, because I do believe that everyone who reads this blog knows me in real life--is there anyone out there who has no idea who I am??--yet I persist in maintaining the pseudo-anonymity thing, which is hard in this post because it is so tied in to my summer which I'm only writing about obliquely here, even though everyone knows all about it. Stupid, I know, but my very small OCD inclination is manifesting, and I just can't bring myself to change my ways, so obliqueness it is.]

I can't link to "Purple People" because it was just written this summer by two excellent friends of mine whom I could link to, but won't (see above). Let me just say, though, that if these friends ever make it big, which is quite possible, you can say that you first heard about "Purple People" here and, like the rest of us, you won't be able to stop singing it.

"Wagon Wheel" is a little more complicated, I've just discovered, in the course of my requisite googling. Everyone everywhere (in the tiny little corner of the world where I spent my summer) was singing "Wagon Wheel." Why were we singing it? I have no idea. Truly. But singing it we were. I was told it was an old Dylan song, but apparently it's an Old Crow Medicine Show/Dylan mashup (yes, I know I'm using the word mashup unorthodoxly these days, but it's my blog and I can do what I want). I've never heard of Old Crow Medicine Show, but here's a video of them singing it. Here are the lyrics and, at the bottom, a bit of the complicated history.

Maybe you can tell why we sang it all the time, and maybe you can't, but one of the highlights of my summer was sitting in B and B's tiny living room, which used to be our tiny living room too, and I can't believe all eight of us used to share that tiny house, while B and J and S played guitar, and we all sang "Wagon Wheel," and I remembered once again that guys playing guitar are totally hot, and singing with your friends is the best, and it was a perfect summer night, and all was good in the world--at least our tiny little corner of the world.

(Summer of 1987? Another summer with B: Graceland and Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car.")

(This is another one of those posts that absolutely proves how solipsistically useless blogs are.)