Dusk and Summer
This album. This fucking album. Almost a year ago, on my last night in America I stood amongst the throng on the Rockefeller, staring as the sunset set Central Park and Upper Manhattan ablaze.
I remember the review when this album surfaced, the tagline being “How to Hijack the Summer in 10 tracks”. The record is the end of summer, the last stab at romance, the curtain call, and the end. The moment.
I remember the furtive feeling of not just that September evening, but the feeling of change. I’d escaped the shackles of a constrictive situation, I was moving to a new town, I don’t believe in new starts as it implies that everything that has gone before was for nothing, but this was the closing and firm FIRM final chapter, and I was sharpening the pencil and brainstorming the sequel.
That vignette, and those lyrics
And I will leave under the cover
Of summer's kiss upon the sky
Like the stone face of your lover
Just before she says goodbye
I was certain that the season could be held between my arms
Well just as summer's hold is fleeting
I was here but now I'm gone…
Everything was changing and yet I’ve not felt an invincibility quite like it. If I’d jumped from that rooftop, on the way down I would have sworn to you I had wings.
And so today. Nashville airport. Back in the South, the hazy, convoluted but quite brilliant South. The album is on again, and I’m trying as hard as I can to be reflective. I haven’t shaken the feeling that I am constantly and unequivocally in motion, and the biggest and brightest reflection I have is that I am so totally OK with this.
I am finding myself wondering around the airport free of any inhibitions, D&S on repeat, sun setting, air miming to every lyric. It’s a bad habit. I do this on treadmills. I get lost in it.
But
It’s coming from a place of massive over-romanticism yeah… (it’s a problem that I fully own). But it’s coming from a place of gratitude. The summer is coming to a close and the world is turning. In 5 days I will be in Budapest, in 7 I’ll be another year older. I am at peace with the fact that I am jumping far too hard and If I fall, I’m gonna fall in style.
Gratitude is the unlock. It isn’t binary tickboxes, it is running like Wile E Coyote on thin air over the cliff edge, and every so often… stopping. Stopping in the middle of a lake in Tampare in a kayak, metaphorically stopping whilst actually running down the South Bank as you and your drunk ass friend laugh at absolutely nothing at all. Stopping in Hissho Sushi in Nashville airport and thrashing out everything in your head.
I am so acutely aware now that I don’t have answers for everything, but
who cares
Why not search anyway.
Dusk and Summer, and the chance to listening to it at the pinch point as one season fades out, as I drink in nostalgia and just let my heart take the lead, it’s all of the above.