Summer just wouldn't be the same without the Beach Boys

✯ Day 228 of Vintage 365 ✯

 

There are certain songs that one automatically associates with each season. Obviously Christmas tunes get top billing in December, and come October Thriller and Monster Mash are required playing, but if we delve deeper, it's easy to see how particular songs and artists fit well into each time of the year.

A drizzly March afternoon is suits everything from slow jazz to Simon & Garfunkle, an effervescently golden September Sunday would seem a little less beautiful if it didn't have upbeat tunes by artists like The Andrews Sisters and Cab Calloway to help keep such days’ ingrained energy buzzing.

For as many songs as we automatically tie winter, I think that the largest soundtrack of my life belongs to the summertime. While not comprised strictly of vintage songs, many of the tunes that - no matter what month of the year it is - whip my mind back in time to summers past, are pretty much all well-known and greatly loved classics.

As I sit here and type this post, it strikes me that it might have made more sense to do chat about this topic back in June when this summer was fresh, however because I wasn't able to post every day that month (remember the two Vintage 365 round-up posts?), I wasn't struck by the notion to do so back then.

Nevertheless, it's definitely still summer (for a little over a month more), and while we've got the sun beating down our necks, the seashore calling our name, and bathing suits at the front of the closet, it's high time we enjoy a fabulously fun song - and one of my all-time summer favourites - from 1962, The Beach Boy's Surfin' Safari.

It's amazing, I cannot hear this song without all but tasting the juicy hamburgers we grilled in the backyard when I was growing, smell Coppertone, feel the sublime Okanagan heat baking into my sun. I'm suddenly nine years old, swinging a hula hop wildly around my hips, the distant sound of motor boats bouncing across town from the lake all the way to our deck.

Music is incredible. It can take us back to last week or decades into the past. It helps, I find, illuminate memories with amazing clarity, and can bring forth a staggering array of emotions. In the jukebox of the hottest season of the year, it would be impossible for me not to play this - and several other - Beach Boys songs, they're a universal anthem for this fabulous time of the year

Most of the songs on my summer playlist are akin to this sparklingly fun early 60s tune. They have a great tempo, keep things light and breezy, hail from days long past, and posses the enchanting ability to both whisk me back in time and enhance the here and now.

I'm grateful for the songs of summer and all that they've meant to my life, and wanted to share this particular tune with you while the season was still going strong.

What songs and artists when you reflect back on your life, are your summer go-to songs?