Dear Fall,
I have been meaning to write this for years.
Not a song about the things you bring, although I have written fourteen of those now and I stand behind every one of them. Not a song about the pumpkins or the corn mazes or the hay rides or the firepit nights. This one is for you. Just you. A love letter to the season itself, sung directly to the thing I have been waiting for since the last time it left.
“When It Gets Crisp” is Track 13 on Give Me Fall, my album releasing August 31st, and a quiet love letter to fall itself was not something I planned at the beginning of this project. It was something the project asked for. After song after song about everything fall brings and everyone fall becomes better with, it felt right to write one straight to the season itself. To the air. To the cracked window. To the morning that arrives and tells you, before you have opened your eyes fully, that everything is about to change.
This song opens the way that first fall morning opens. I cracked the window open this morning and felt you on the air before I saw you come. The sun is sleeping in a little later and the evenings are pulling darkness on. I have been waiting since the last of you left me. These are real things, the literal, sensory experience of fall announcing itself before you have any evidence of it. Fall is the season that tells you it is coming before it arrives. The cardigans go on a Tuesday. The coffee shops change their menus. The light shifts. And you know.
The second verse holds all of my personal fall rituals. The cardigans lined up by color on the chair. The people on the street looking lighter, like something in them knows you are there. The orange cup appearing like a sign. And somewhere in the back of every closet, the Christmas things waiting for their time. That last detail is one of my favorites in the whole song because it is so true. Fall brings Christmas closer and you can feel it, the way you can feel something approaching from a great distance, the anticipation of anticipation, the waiting for the next wonderful thing while you are fully inside this wonderful thing.
The pre-chorus is the most honest confession in the song. I know you never stay as long as I want you to. But oh, the way you come back every year. You make the whole world feel like it can start again. That’s why I’ve been standing here, waiting for you. Fall is the only season I grieve when it leaves. Winter does not make me sad in the same way, because winter is quiet and rest-giving in its own way. But fall. Fall I miss while it is still here. I mourn it preemptively while I am standing in the middle of it. And every year when it comes back I feel something release in my chest that I did not know I was holding.
The chorus is a declaration. When it gets crisp I know you’re here. When it gets crisp everything is clear. The colors change, the mornings slow, the windows open, the candles glow. When it gets crisp I come alive. Something in me opens up and I remember who I am and what I love. When it gets crisp, there you are. I want to live inside that chorus. I want it playing on October mornings when the air is exactly right and the window is cracked and something warm is in my hands.
The bridge gets quiet and almost tender. People are smiling at strangers on the street like the cold gave everyone permission to be a little softer, a little more themselves. Like fall is just that kind of season. And then the prayer at the end: stay a little longer this year. I’ll keep the windows cracked. I’ll have the candles ready. I’ll have the cardigan out. Just stay.
This is what I want every person who listens to this album to feel. That invitation to stay. To stay in the moment, to stay with the people they love, to stay present to the beautiful ordinary life happening all around them in orange and gold and cinnamon and woodsmoke. Give me fall. And when fall gets here, let me be awake for every last minute of it.
Thank you for listening to all fifteen songs. Thank you for giving this album your time and your heart. I wrote it for you and I wrote it for me and I wrote it for every person who has ever looked up at an October sky and felt something almost too big to name.
Tell me in the comments: what does fall feel like to you the moment it arrives? What is your first sign that it is here? I want every detail.
Please follow me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, and Pandora so Give Me Fall is waiting for you on August 31st. Come be part of this community on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and join my email list here where I share everything first.
When it gets crisp, there you are. Every year. There you are.
With so much love, Melanie Grace