What makes a song feel like summer? A summer song typically features major key tonality, upbeat or mid-tempo groove, imagery of warmth and openness, and an emotional quality of freedom or nostalgic joy. The best summer songs are specific enough to feel real but universal enough that any listener can place themselves directly inside them.
Have a listen to my very own curated Spotify Playlist for summer – Beach Vibes!
I Can Feel Summer Coming
Not just in the Southern California weather, though the temperature has absolutely been making its intentions known this week. I feel it in my creative energy, in the way the music I am working on is starting to want to move differently, reach differently, arrive somewhere instead of sit with something. There is a particular lightness that starts appearing in my songwriting at this time of year without being summoned. The themes shift. The tempos want to move faster. The melodies naturally want to go upward.
Summer as a musical feeling is one of the most universally recognizable experiences that exists across cultures. Almost everyone has a summer song that defined a specific year for them, a song that when it plays now instantly transports them back to that exact summer with the windows down and the best version of themselves showing up unexpectedly in the moment.
Why Are Songwriters So Drawn to the Summer Sound?
Summer songs are a creative obsession because they carry a specific and demanding emotional promise: that joy is allowed, that life right now is good, that today is worth being fully present for. That promise is actually harder to deliver in music than it sounds at first. Writing a genuinely great summer song requires all the craft of any other kind of song, but you are additionally working against the risk of it feeling generic, forced, or like a commercial for a feeling rather than the feeling itself.
The secret of every great summer song is specificity. Not happiness in the abstract but this particular happiness on this particular afternoon with these specific people in this exact quality of light. The detail is what makes the joy feel real and earned rather than manufactured. Vague celebration does not connect. Specific, fully-realized, embodied joy absolutely connects.
What Summer Music Is Coming From Melanie Grace?
The first major summer project is I Love America, arriving June 8th, and it has that wide open American summer quality to it that I have been trying to describe all week. Think sky, wind, road, freedom from deadline, the specific feeling of this country at its most beautiful and spacious. That is the emotional landscape this music was built to inhabit.
Summer is coming and I am writing it down as fast as my hands will go. If you want to be the first to know when new music drops, subscribe and come back here every day through the season. The best is genuinely still ahead.