Opening Up the Windows                                                                  Gesina A. Phillips

My favorite day of the year is the first day I can open up all of the windows without running for a sweater.  I spend the entire day becalmed, unable to do anything except consider the nature and beauty of weather.   As evening rolls around, I sadly close up the house again, already dreaming of summer.  This is the romantic phase.  Before I remember what it’s like to be sick to death of sticking to furniture and sweating through all of my clothes.  But this first breath of warm air begins the spring-anticipating-summer phase, when summer appears to consist exclusively of mosquito-free evenings of sparkling conversation, laundry drying on lines, and popsicles that never melt too quickly and get all over your hands and clothes.  Maybe this is actually what your entire summer experience boils down to, but probably not.  More likely there are more hours spent sweltering in traffic, backs of legs burnt by too-hot car seats, and horrifying bug bites than you would care to remember.

There’s just something about the prospect of warm evenings that manufactures a rose-tinted nostalgia.  Given this year’s abnormal weather patterns, it’s highly likely that you have already experienced the first warm, perfect day of the year.  Luckily, there are certain songs that capture that brink-of-summer feeling and play it back to you in any kind of weather.  Some songs are about summer, and some just capture the expectance of that first breath of warm air.  When the weather starts getting warm, I turn first to The Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” for the sonic equivalent of a languid June day.  Then there’s Best Coast, whose California beach aesthetic makes it seem as though their songs were intended to be played on a boombox by the sea (but sometimes driving through Bloomfield with the windows down will have to do).  Grouplove is largely a warm-weather band, as well, but “Naked Kids” is perhaps the perfect song about being young and stupid in the summer sun.  And what else is summer for, really, regardless of whether you’re a teenager or not?

But the songs that just feel like summer are somehow more captivating and mysterious.  That a combination of sounds can evoke feelings and memories is consistently baffling to me.  Nevertheless, certain songs play with my emotions, manipulating me into being 13 again and sprinting my way through summer.  The echo-laden cascade of guitars in The Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” sounds like a summer evening, when the air is comfortably close but tinged with the hint of adventure.  “Daydreamin’,” from Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor, features a chorus by Jill Scott that sounds like napping in Wonderland—blissed out and threatening all at once.  Alela Diane’s voice is a breeze coming in through an open window, fluttering the white curtains around it; El Guincho’s Pop Negro bathes you in a deluge of steel drums and chilled-out rhythms.  These songs capture the carefree, breezy daydream of a warm day, all sun but no sunburn.

Still others songs are less obviously identified with a particular season, becoming “summer songs” through the transformative process of memory—the hit single that played every time you got in the car the first summer you had your license, the track that you played on repeat with friends for the entirety of July.  Of course, it doesn’t matter to anyone else that Grace reminds me of the summer I spent falling in love with Jeff Buckley, or that “Girl and the Sea” by The Presets is my go-to song for warm-weather thunderstorms.  Perhaps Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” sounds sufficiently like the soundtrack to walking down a city street in the waning light that it qualifies as more than a personal memory of summer, but then again perhaps not.  Memory is tricky.  I am sure you have your own songs that transport you to an idyllic warm-weather daydream, and I am equally sure that they would not do the same for me.  For now, in this still-fickle season, let’s enjoy that anticipation of summer before we remember the parts that make us wish for snowy forecasts again.

Gesina Phillips is a recovering grad student and a recent transplant from south Jersey to Pittsburgh.  She likes it here, although she misses her stupid state.  She is the newest member of the New Yinzer staff.