lunasspecto's Disc

Selected Summer Jams, 1936-2022, lunasspecto’s entry in the Summer Anthems 2025 MiniDisc swap.

• Axia Natural Sound MD80, dolphin theme
• Original Axia slipcase and card, written by hand (poorly, and with smudges—sorry!)
• Front and spine labels printed with Brother P-Touch labeler
• Recorded in SP mode from FLAC tracks using NetMD Wizard in Disc-At-Once mode, with Sony MZ-N420D

1. Billie Holiday: Summertime
   
   An obvious place to start, Billie Holiday’s performance captures perfectly the emotional power of this aria from the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess, in which a woman promises to her infant child a future she cannot guarantee.
   
   
2. Ella Fitzgerald: Too Darn Hot
   
   Another of the great jazz divas here provides a cheekier take on the summer heat with this number that Cole Porter wrote for the comic Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate. Writing in 1948, Porter notably worked in a reference to “the Kinsey report” (officially Sexual Behavior in the Human Male), a foundational work of sexological research published that same year.
   
   
3. The Drifters: Under the Boardwalk
   
   If the singer in “Too Darn Hot” finds that the heat of summer has curtailed her intimacy, the subject of this song clearly has no such problem. The Drifters’ laid-back rhythms and the lyrics’ evocative sensory depictions of beachside life made this an enduring touchstone of early pop.
   
   
4. The Lovin’ Spoonful: Summer in the City
   
   One more song with an obvious textual summer theme before the selections become a little more abstract. Ambient sound and uneasy beats evoke hot, sticky days punctuated by a thriving nightlife.
   
   
5. Procol Harum: A Whiter Shade of Pale
   
   My partner says this one sounds like more of a winter song. My justifications for including it here are: first, that its famous Hammond organ hook reminds me of a carnival calliope; and second, that it is remembered as a favorite of San Francisco’s 1967 “Summer of Love”.
   
   
6. The Zombies: Time of the Season
   
   The “season” here is never explicitly stated to be summer, but what other season could it be? Cascading echos and breathy human percussion here create an unforgettable summer soundscape.
   
   
7. Donna Summer: I Feel Love (US promo 7” version)
   
   It’s not merely that her name is Summer! Donna Summer and producer Georgio Moroder created a perfect anthem for hot disco nights, which heralded the future of electronic music and landed in the club scene like an extraterrestrial invasion.
   
   
8. Bob Marley & The Wailers: Three Little Birds
   
   I grew up in the US with Bob Marley as a pop culture icon standing in for two concepts: summer and cannabis. This does a disservice to the multifaceted and deeply influential Jamaican musician, but I am grateful that it exposed me to his music from a young age. This song is my personal favorite of his, an ode to the solace we can find in the natural world amidst an onslaught of man-made tribulations.
   
   
9. ABBA: Voulez-Vous
   
   Following from Donna Summer, ABBA here presents the next evolution of the hot disco night anthem. I initially intended to use “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”, my personal ABBA favorite, but rejected it when I noticed the temporal setting of its lyrics is marked by “autumn winds”.
   
   
10. Talking Heads: Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
    
    This song’s subtitle was inspired by a newspaper headline about a deadly heatwave that appeared during its writing. Here Talking Heads showcase the polyrhythm, frenetic sound design, and challenging lyrics they would use to redefine rock.
    
    
11. Duran Duran: Rio
    
    The music video for “Rio” features the band sailing in the Caribbean, but its lyrics reference vast, sunny deserts along the Mexico-Texas border, divided by the cool, flowing waters of the Rio Grande.
    
    
12. UB40: Red Red Wine
    
    In an unlikely cover, UB40 transform Neil Diamond’s melancholic ballad of regret-fueled binge drinking into a sun-drenched electro-reggae hit.
    
    
13. Los del Rio: Macarena (Bayside Boys remix)
    
    At summer celebrations in the latter part of the 1990s, I could not escape this song. There was a dance to memorize for this one, but I never quite got it.
    
    
14. Baha Men: Who Let the Dogs Out
    
    The layered percussion and the band’s doglike barking on this Junkanoo track made it a surprise summer novelty hit in the U.S. Its lyrics mock young misogynist men misbehaving at a party, but it often appeared in pop culture in combination with literal dogs, as in promotions for the Disney-produced comedy film Snow Dogs. For a time, a cover of this song became the stadium song of the Seattle Mariners baseball team while I lived in the greater Seattle-Tacoma area.
    
    
15. O-Zone: Dragostea din tei
    
    Moldovan boy band O-Zone had their one big international hit when this 2003 song charted across Europe in 2004 and 2005. I didn’t hear it on U.S. radio at the time, but instead first heard it when my family took a rare international summer vacation in Québec City. The song was everywhere as soon as we crossed the border into Canada, and I had no idea what language it was in or what it was called but I was instantly hooked.
    
    
16. Gwen Stefani feat. Akon: The Sweet Escape
    
    I was never particularly into Gwen Stefani at the height of her solo career, but in the summer of 2007 this song was… inescapable. Constantly on the radio, playing from every ice cream stand and surf shop along the boardwalk. It is a crowning achievement of the pop “wall of sound” technique.
    
    
17. Edward Maya feat. Vika Jigulina: Stereo Love (Molella remix radio edit)
    
    Much like “Dragostea din tei”, this 2009 Romanian song took a couple years to go global. By late spring / early summer in 2011 I was hearing it all over New York City, where I was then attending school, and even sometimes back home in New England. Often the only part of it I caught was the accordian hook, but that seemed to follow me everywhere and lodged itself in my head until it practically haunted my dreams.
    
    
18. Lana Del Ray: Summertime Sadness
    
    I don’t think I have to justify identifying this one as a summer song. Lana Del Ray’s 2012 album Born to Die hit an interesting moment in the Usonian cultural zeitgeist that was really primed for its particular blend of nostalgic glamour and macabre melancholy. The following year would see the release of Baz Luhrmann’s epic 3-D film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Gilded Age tragedy The Great Gatsby, which would feature another Lana Del Ray hit, “Young and Beautiful”.
    
    
19. Camila Cabello feat. Young Thug: Havana
    
    “Havana” released in August 2017 and met with traditional chart success in the U.S. and U.K. before becoming a massive streaming hit in the summer of 2018. Its detuned salsa piano backing brought Cuban musical influence back into the U.S. cultural spotlight. Another song perfectly calibrated for summer dancing and guaranteed to get stuck in my head.
    
    
20. Doja Cat: Say So
    
    In June 2020 a member of my family was undergoing surgery in San Francisco and needed someone to accompany them to and from appointments, keep track of their meds during recovery, and so on. I lived in Massachusetts at the time and “non-essential” public institutions all over the place were of course shut down to limit coronavirus spread; officially travel to California was discouraged and I had to explain a few times to different people why I was there at all. Still, I had never been to San Francisco before and was fully captivated by the city, and at any daytime moment when I was not immediately needed I would walk about Ocean Beach, Sutro Baths, and the Presidio, masked and keeping my distance. The Upper Great Highway, a classic multilane divided freeway along Ocean Beach, was closed to cars during the daytime to promote distanced outdoor exercise, an arrangement that would later be made permanent, so I had the novel experience of jogging under jumbo overhead highway signs as if I were in a post-apocalyptic thriller. The nationwide uprising following the murder of George Floyd was at its most active point in the Bay Area at that time, indirectly causing a struggle to obtain my relative’s post-surgery meds when Walgreens abruptly closed and boarded up all its pharmacies in the city on the same day the meds were prescribed in response to a widely-publicized looting.
    
    The song that represents this strange and singular summer for me is one I first heard in a rideshare on the way to one of my relative’s medical appointments. We were on our way out of the city, heading to a hospital north of the Bay. The sun seemed to me impossibly bright after years of living in New England. As we approached a rainbow painted on the concrete around the opening of the Robin Williams Tunnel, the driver put on a singer I’d never heard before, Doja Cat singing “Say So”, and it was an odd moment of magic in the midst of everything that has colored how I hear the song ever since.
    
    
21. Harry Styles: As It Was
    
    The more obvious Harry Styles selection would of course be his 2020 single “Watermelon Sugar”, but “As It Was” has its own special place in my life as a summer song. I heard it constantly in the summer of 2022, when I was still routinely wearing a mask whenever I went out for groceries and various social arrangements of my life (where I worked, how we provided recreation and social opportunities for our kids, even where we lived) had been either modified by the pandemic or determined by choices constrained and influenced by it. And here was a song that captured the moment perfectly: musically upbeat and lyrically uncertain about a present somehow worlds apart from the not-at-all-distant past. Summer still comes every year, each year a bit hotter than the last, and yet truly nothing is the same as it was.
    
    For the same reason, the song also feels like a fitting capstone on this retrospective playlist. Oh, how much can change in the span of eighty-six years!