The Songs of the Summer

The idea of the “song of the summer” is revisited every single year—in Twitter conversations, in music critic thinkpieces, on radio stations. There’s always a race to crown the one pop hit that defines the season and becomes the soundtrack to parties, wedding receptions, bars, clubs, and road trips. I have always felt left out of that conversation, because I kind of hate most mainstream radio pop. The song of the summer, according to public consciousness, is always a pop hit, which means I almost always don’t care for it. I also just don’t find the song of the summer conversation interesting, because it’s determined mainly based on radio dominance (and now, streaming numbers). It’s just another hit song. The only thing that sets it apart is that it happens to land in a particular season.

So, with the end of summer fast approaching, I decided to put my own little twist on the conversation. I realized that what bored me about the song of the summer debates wasn’t that the songs getting chosen were pop songs. Rather, it was the idea that one song was supposed to define summer for everyone. I’d much rather read about the songs that defined summers for individuals—and more importantly, about why.

With that thought in mind, I went back to 2001 and re-litigated my own personal song of the summer debates for each year since. Which song do I think of first when I think of the summer in question? Which song, when I hear it, takes me back in time to the summer when I was 10, or 17, or 23? And why did those songs end up tied to those seasons so specifically, when there were always dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other songs making their way to my to my ears during the same months?

To go through this exercise, I had to establish a few ground rules for myself:

1. I needed to start in 2001, because it’s the first summer where I can remember music playing an active roll in my life. There are songs that I associate with previous summers. If I went back to the 90s, surely Fastball’s “Out of My Heard,” Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” The Wallflowers’ “The Difference,” Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova,” and Green Day’s “When I Come Around” would be ruling their respective years. But music at that time was less crucial to who I was or how I lived my life. 2001 made more sense as a starting point, for reasons I will discuss below.
2. A song doesn’t necessarily need to be from the year in question to be the song of the summer, but it needs to be close. For this point, I deferred to the “Maroon 5 rule,” so named because Maroon 5 had arguably the ubiquitous pop hit of the summer of 2004 (with “She Will Be Loved”) despite the fact that the song had come out in 2002. Per this rule, a song could be a maximum of two years old to be considered a candidate.
3. The song of the summer could not be a ballad. This rule is probably my most arbitrary, and may or may not get broken regularly with actual radio hits. Still, when I think of the song of the summer, I think of a windows-down anthem. There were a few times where I felt tempted to break this rule for a wistful summer night ballad, but I ultimately view those songs in a different category. (Cue my “top 20 all-time summer night songs” list.)
4. Artist repeats can happen in the song of the summer conversation, but they are exceedingly rare. Looking back over the past 20 years, I think the only artist you could argue for having dominated two summers (in the mainstream consciousness, anyway) is Katy Perry. As such, I left myself open to artist repeats, but tried to steer clear, if steering clear was possible. I didn’t end up with any.

Thus, without further ado, my personal songs of the summer from 2001 to 2018.

2001: Lifehouse - “Hanging by a Moment” (from No Name Face)

I spent more time actively listening to the radio in the summer of 2001 than I probably have in all the years since combined. For some reason, I got super into following along with the top 40 countdown every Sunday morning. I’d even write out lists of the songs, in order, and try to guess what was coming next. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why I subjected myself to this truly special form of torture. Even back then, I disliked many of the songs, tolerated some of them, and only truly liked five or six. The only reason I can think of for listening faithfully every week was this song. I loved “Hanging by a Moment.” The propulsive hook; the balance of the low vocal lines in the verse and the soaring melodies in the chorus; the title. I remember listening to the countdown every weekend that summer, hoping this song would land the number one slot, and always being disappointed when it got bested by something else—usually the Moulin Rouge version of “Lady Marmalade.” “Hanging by a Moment” never hit number one on the Hot 100 or the Top 40, but it played runner-up for so long that it ended up being the top song of the year anyway. I don’t care about any of that chart stuff anymore, but I still have a soft spot for this song, which reminds me of summertime in the days of endless (perhaps too much) free time.

2002: Jimmy Eat World - “The Middle” (from Bleed American)

I spent at least half of the summer of 2002 at my friend David’s house—most of it playing video games, watching movies, or pretending to be Jedi Knights. I think I spent an average of two nights a week over at his house, just staying up late and trying to beat the latest Gamecube or PlayStation games. It was a busy summer—probably my ultimate summer of “being a kid”—and all that activity meant I definitely wasn’t sitting around my house listening to the top 40 countdown. If there’s a song that defines this summer, though, it’s gotta be “The Middle.” “The Middle” broke on the radio around the end of my fifth grade year, and its influence bled (no pun intended) right into the summer months. I remember hearing it so many times on the radio in the mornings when my mom would drive me to school. In the summer, the destination of those drives changed—usually to David’s house—but I was still always happy to hear this song on the radio. Considering what Jimmy Eat World would eventually become in the scheme of my musical evolution and my life in general, it’s still surreal to me that they had a hit big enough to reasonably contend for mainstream song of the summer status. There has not been a better consensus contender since.

2003: Our Lady Peace - “Innocent” (from Gravity)

2003 was the summer where everything started to change. I was almost a teenager, I was running with my brother and the high school cross country team in the mornings, and my brother had finally taught my sister and I how to download music and burn CDs. Not to glorify a crime or anything, but learning the ropes of KaZaa and Winamp blew the doors off my 12-year-old mind. Suddenly, every song I’d ever heard was at my disposal. The 90s gems I hadn’t listened to in years; my favorite songs off the radio; the songs I was hearing on TV shows. I burned probably six or seven CDs that summer, just loading up my collection with old favorites and new curiosities alike. “Innocent” was a song I wasn’t familiar with. I discovered it on our home computer, in a Winamp playlist full of songs my brother had already downloaded. My god I loved it. It seemed to say something about adolescence and growing up that I hadn’t quite encountered yet, but was about to. It remains one of my favorite songs about growing up, to the point where it ended up on the playlist I listened to on the drive to my high school graduation.

2004: Dashboard Confessional - “Vindicated (from the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack)

Picking one song from the summer of 2004 was very nearly impossible. By all accounts, this season was the start of my great musical awakening. Sugarcult’s “Memory” was my “beginning of summer” song. Snow Patrol’s “Chocolate” was my “summer road trip” song. Yellowcard’s “Ocean Avenue” was my “I’m so glad they’re playing this on the radio this summer” song. All those songs were valid candidates, as were the entireties of Counting Crows’ Hard Candy and Sister Hazel’s Chasing Daylight—my first two “summer albums.” But I don’t think anything sounds more like the summer of 2004 to me than Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated.” “I am seeing in me now the things you swore you saw yourself,” Chris Carrabba cries at the end of the chorus. What a beautiful, angsty lyric, so perfect for my first teenage summer. When I hear it now, I remember everything about that season: trips to the beach; outings to the movies; too many hours spent playing Grand Theft Auto in the basement with my brother; staying up late reading books because it was too goddamn hot to sleep; the dumbest theater camp of all time; and a burgeoning love for music, manifested in a voracious search for new songs and an increasingly meticulous approach to sequencing my burned CD playlists. “Vindicated” also moved my tastes subtly toward pop-punk and emo, setting the stage for that fall when albums like Jimmy Eat World’s Futures and Green Day’s American Idiot would change my life forever.

2005: Better Than Ezra - “A Lifetime” (from Before the Robots)

Growing up, I loved vacations, but didn’t care much for long road trips. No matter how many activities I tried to give myself to do in the car, I’d get bored and end up restless in the backseat, asking some variation of that quintessential family vacation question: “Are we there yet?” My siblings and I tried lots of different strategies for keeping ourselves entertained in the car. We tried audiobooks. We tried setting up a TV in the backseat and watching movies. One year we even rigged up a videogame setup. But those strategies were always just ways to kill time. When I fell in love with music, things changed. Suddenly, I looked forward to the long drive almost as much as I looked forward to the destination. I loved making myself comfortable in the backseat, picking out something to play on my portable CD player or iPod, and letting the music wash over me as I watched the country pass by outside. “A Lifetime,” my song of the summer from 2005, has always been a road trip song to me. I bought Before the Robots the night before we departed for a family reunion, and I played it exhaustively on that trip. There were at least half a dozen other true blue summer songs on that record, but “A Lifetime” always stuck out the most to me. It’s a song that should be sad—it’s about a girl who crashes her car and dies on the morning of her high school graduation. But the song subverts expectations, winding down a narrative path where the narrator steals the girl’s urn at her wake and takes her out for one last perfect summertime adventure. “Three and a half minutes felt like a lifetime” goes the chorus punchline. The best summer songs epitomize that line, because they pack entire seasons into their beautiful bursts of lyrics and melody.

2006: Jack’s Mannequin - “La La Lie” (from Everything in Transit)

There’s no better summer album than Everything in Transit, and no song that exudes the atmosphere of my teenage summers quite like “La La Lie.” The explosive harmonica. The shimmering keys. A hook so catchy that it has never failed to make me run a little bit faster or drive a little bit more recklessly. “I’m coming back to my girl by July.” Transit was a 2005 release, but it didn’t make its way into my life until the first week of summer vacation 2006. In a summer that had plenty of other worthy soundtrack candidates—specifically Dashboard Confessional’s Dusk and Summer and Butch Walker’s The Rise and Fall—this record still came out on top. It’s what I reached for on road trips or evening runs on the golf course, or on afternoons when I just wanted to kill time in my room and listen to music. Future summers would be more eventful, more angsty, more dangerous—and Everything in Transit would soundtrack bits and pieces of all of them. But 2006 was the last year where it really felt like I had 14 to 16 waking hours to kill every day; no responsibility, no obligations. “La La Lie” was and is the sound of that impossible, irretrievable freedom.

2007: Black Lab - “Mine Again” (from Passion Leaves a Trace)

I spent less time listening to music in the summer of 2007 than any other year featured on this list. For three weeks, from late June to mid-July, I was away at Interlochen Arts Camp, for a musical theater program. Phones were banned, and I’m pretty sure iPods were frowned upon. So I went three weeks without music at the peak of summertime—ironic, since I was in a place where music was all around me in every other way. For whatever reason, the song that kept popping into my head when I couldn’t actually listen to music was Black Lab’s “Mine Again.” It’s a fever dream of a song, one that captures flickers of memory and wraps them around a chorus that sounds like heaven. A girl in a red dress; lying barefoot in the grass; stealing hours alone together in the midst of summer; a picture in your mind of a lost love that feels as vivid as if the photo were taken yesterday. “Every day, I will wait ‘til your mine again,” goes the hook. Back then, I associated this song with a girl. Now, I hear it as yearning for a type of innocence and naivete that can only last for so long. This was my last summer of that feeling, and this song still feels like one of its very last vestiges.

2008: Safetysuit - “Someone Like You” (from Life Left to Go)

The summer of 2008 changed everything. It was my first summer with a car. It was my first summer with a job. It was my first summer at home as the only kid left in the nest, with both my siblings away. It was my first summer of drinking and parties. And it was my first summer in love. The result was the most tumultuous two and a half months of my life, and there’s no song that encapsulates that better than “Someone Like You.” Sure, there are songs that speak to the sadder moments of that season—and there were a lot of them. But “Someone Like You” was the song that taught me just how fun it could be to scream along to an anthem in the front seat of your car with the windows rolled down on a sunny day. It’s a song with enough power and drive to be that kind of summer jam, but it also had traces of melancholic angst around the edges—perfect for all the adolescent emotions I was dealing with at the time. Looking back, that season was the best and worst summer of my life, all rolled into one. On the one hand, the freedom and possibility of those nights seemed genuinely infinite. After so many summers spent mostly tethered to my house, I reveled in the ability to stay out as late as I wanted, or to go anywhere. On the other hand, I was working a job I hated and pining after a girl that I wasn’t ever going to get. By the time that summer ended, I didn’t have much left but a broken heart and a lot of sad songs. “Someone Like You” was the exception, something that still sounded hopeful even after everything that had happened. It was the first song I played after I woke up on the first day of senior year, my way of saying “Things are going to get better.”

2009: Cary Brothers - “The Last One” (from Who You Are)

If you’d have asked me at the outset, I’d have told you that the summer of 2009 was going to be the most celebratory and carefree of my life—at least up to that point. I’d finished up high school; I had three months of total freedom before I’d be heading off to college, to major in music; I had a few big concerts and trips on the calendar. By all accounts, it should have been a summer full of parties and youthful recklessness and long nights of fun and loud, blazing summer anthems. When I look back now, though, I think of the summer of 2009 in very melancholy terms. Part of it, I think, was the weather. Summer 2009 was unusually gloomy in northern Michigan, filled with rain and unseasonably cold days. A lot of it didn’t feel like summer at all, let alone what I expected from my first post-high-school summer. Another part, though, was sadness. The grief of dealing with death for the first time—when we had to put my childhood dog to sleep—still lingers over my memories of that summer. So does the feeling I had in the pit of my stomach that my friend group was never going to be as close again as we were that summer. Trying to pick a song to represent all those heavy, conflicted feelings was difficult, especially since I felt like the summer after graduation deserved an anthem. But “The Last One”—a burst of new-wavy pop from Cary Brothers’ 2007 debut album—is the song that I think captures that summer for what it was. It’s zippy and catchy enough to be a song of the summer, but you can hear the stormclouds gathering. I played Brothers’ album, Who You Are, exhaustively throughout the second half of that summer, its patient, sad ballads capturing my melancholy coming-of-age moment with the grace of an 80s movie soundtrack.

2010: Chad Perrone - “Blinded” (from Wake)

The summer of 2010 was the best summer of my life. I was enjoying my first college summer, which meant I had four solid months of freedom—versus the two and a half you get in high school. I was home for the break, which meant reconnecting with old friends. I’d landed a job at a dinner theater in my town, which meant I was literally getting paid to sing and perform oldies pop songs. And I was falling in love with a girl from high school, a girl who I would end up marrying four years later. “Blinded” captured so much of the joy and butterflies of that season. The music of Chad Perrone came into my life at the outset of that summer, recommended by an online friend who knew Chad from the Boston music scene. The first time I heard “Blinded,” driving to rehearsal for my job on some gorgeous June evening, I knew it was going to soundtrack my summer. What I didn’t know was that the song—about being ready to let your guard down and gamble everything on the feelings you have for another person—was going to be prophetic. After that girl and I started dating, “Blinded” was the first song I ever put on a mixtape for her. I listened to it hundreds of times over the next year, both in moments of that perfect, pure hometown summer and of the ensuing school year and the long distance relationship we maintained throughout it. The night before we got married, at our rehearsal dinner, “Blinded” was the song I quoted in my speech: “How do you believe in anything enough to know that it will never change?” Sometimes, there are things you just know in your gut, whether it’s a question of the song that’s going to define your summer or of the woman who you are going to spend your life with.

2011: The Dangerous Summer - “No One’s Gonna Need You More” (from War Paint)

No song ever defined a summer as much as “No One’s Gonna Need You More” defined the summer of 2011. Most of the songs on this list I played dozens of times throughout the summer in question. With this song, it was hundreds. I could not get enough of War Paint, and I definitely couldn’t get enough of “No One’s Gonna Need You More.” To my ears, it was the perfect summer song. It had the bright, sunny catchiness that had always made pop-punk a go-to genre for summer mixtapes, but it also had the emotion and angst necessary to foreground the romantic whirlwind insanity of being a young adult with some freedom left to burn. “Every lonely heart can use an honest song they can sing along to,” sings AJ Perdomo in the second verse. That summer, I really needed to fall in love with music again. I’d suffered through the worst semester of my life and an interminable winter to get back home for another summer, and I always felt like this song and the album it came from were my rewards. In the midst of a crossroads moment in my life, The Dangerous Summer made every night, drive, kiss, swim, sunset, beach day, and song feel like heaven for two months straight. I might never have needed an honest song more.

2012: Yellowcard – “Always Summer” (from Southern Air)

“I left home but there’s one thing that I still know/It’s always summer in my heart and in my soul.” In any other summer, I don’t think those lines would have meant as much to me. But the summer of 2012 was the end of lots of things. It was my last college summer, the last one before I graduated. It was my last summer in my childhood town—at least until the current summer, but we’ll get to that part of the story in time. It was my last summer working my job at the local dinner theater, before it closed shop forever. In a lot of ways, it was the last summer of my youth, and driving away from it with “Always Summer” blaring through my speakers felt like a picture perfect coming-of-age moment. This song meant so much to me that summer, on blazing hot drives or late nights after work, sneaking drinks from behind the bar after we sent audiences on their way. It was like Yellowcard had anticipated my circumstances and had written a song that would dovetail with them perfectly. I still can’t hear this song without feeling a little sadness for everything I left in my rearview when I drove away at the end of that August. The summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012 were the best ones of my life, and this song was their big grand finale.

2013: John Mayer – “On the Way Home” (from Paradise Valley)

The summer of 2013 didn’t feel much like summer to me. Instead of returning to my bayside hometown for another glorious season in the sun and the water, I was living in an apartment in Naperville, Illinois, in the midst of an oppressively humid season, in the middle of an island of concrete, far from anything that could be considered a beach. It was also a tumultuous time in my life, one where I was casting about for a job—any job—as the economy cratered around me. There were good things, too: I moved in with my girlfriend, after too much time spent doing the long distance thing. But I also crashed my car and had my soul drained working for two weeks in the worst sales job I could have imagined. It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a “bad” summer, and coming after three straight greatest hits, that broke my heart. “On the Way Home” was my song of the summer not because it gave me the kind of anthem that I’d looked for in other years, but because it felt so fitting as I yearned for the summers of my youth. This song sounds like the end of summer. It sounds like Labor Day weekend, or the last trip to the beach before the fall breezes send everyone scurrying away. It was also a fitting soundtrack for the actual end of summer, which managed to redeem most of the bad things that had happened. On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, on a trip home, I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she said yes. This song wasn’t the soundtrack to that particular moment, but it still encapsulates a lot of what that season was for me: wistful, backward-looking, and a little bit bittersweet.

2014: Bleachers - “Rollercoaster” (from Strange Desire)

“It was summer when I saw your face/Looked like a teenage runaway.” Those are the first two lines from “Rollercoaster,” the kind of summer song I’d been seeking for years but never found until 2014. “Rollercoaster” has the charm and sweep of a classic 80s teen movie. It’s the kind of song that could have been in a John Hughes flick, or maybe in something like “Adventureland.” It encapsulates the anything-could-happen electricity that flows through summer days and nights when you’re young and free and falling in love for the first time. If “Rollercoaster” had hit a few years earlier, when I was living that kind of freedom, I would probably love it even more than I do. As it was, 2014 was a big summer of landmark moments for me—moments that felt pretty far removed from the youth this song describes. Instead of falling in love or sneaking kisses late at night, I was getting married to the girl of my dreams and committing to a lifetime with her. And instead of the tumultuous whirlwind of a summer vacation—and an end-of-summer return to school—I ended my summer by leaving Illinois in the rearview and moving back to Michigan for another new life chapter. Still, even though I might not have been living the wild, youthful spirit of “Rollercoaster,” I was living its sense of momentous occasions and exciting revelations. During the last month of summer, leading up to that big move back to Michigan, I played this song over and over again, using it to turn the sweltering humidity of a Chicago summer into something that felt romantic. It didn’t quite work, and summers have felt more like they used to since I moved back to Michigan, but “Rollercoaster” still brings back very fond memories of the season when I really started my adult life. One last youthful anthem to send me on my way.

                                                                            

2015: Kelsea Ballerini - “Dibs” (from The First Time)

“Dibs” is one of the catchiest songs of all time. It’s not particularly deep, and it didn’t have the kind of huge emotional impact on my life that many of the other songs on this list did, but my god, the hook. Kelsea Ballerini has been pitched so far in her career as the heir apparent to Taylor Swift, and this song hammered that point home with the most infectious three minutes of pop country to come along this decade. 2015 was a fantastic summer for me. It was the first summer since my wife and I had moved back to Michigan, and our first in the house we’d bought in April of that year. It was also the summer when I started running again, after years of only going for the odd run when it suited me. And, perhaps most crucially, it was the summer that I fell in love with country music. All those factors combined to make it a momentously memorable season. Being in Michigan meant we were only two hours from home and less than an hour from the shores of Lake Michigan. Being in our own house meant I wasn’t trapped inside a cave of an apartment for the summer, but could instead enjoy the season by working out on the porch for a few hours each afternoon. Getting back into running meant I had a new way to enjoy songs and albums—particularly fast, upbeat, optimistic summer anthems like this one. And falling in love with country meant that I was discovering a new artist or song or record I loved almost daily. “Dibs” was at the cross section of all of the above, the country song that sounded best on summer afternoons out on the porch, or during runs when I needed something to push me to a faster pace for that last mile. Every time it came up during a workout, I played it at least twice. Three years later, I still can’t get over the hook or how quickly it conjures up the summer where I fell back in love with summer again.

2016: Butch Walker - “East Coast Girl” (from Stay Gold)

Stay Gold was like Everything in Transit and War Paint in that, after it arrived, there wasn’t a whole lot else I wanted to listen to for the rest of the summer. Why listen to other albums on runs when this was the one that would make me push myself harder? Why blare any other albums on drives along the shore when this one sounded so damn good blasting out of the my speakers with the windows down? Most of the songs on the record sound like summer, but “East Coast Girl” is very close to being prototypical. It pairs the ‘80s teen movie romanticism of “Rollercoaster” with the Springsteenian sweep of the songs from Born to Run. Of course I loved it. “You can run, but you can’t hide/It’s a cruel, cruel summer outside/Shine on little baby, you were too good for this world/Just another broken east coast girl.” The chorus explodes and the big, bold guitar intro sounds like a dizzying theme park ride on a July night. But the verses are the most interesting: spoken word missives said into a cellphone microphone, like stream-of-consciousness love notes to a girl, or to the past, or to a girl from the past. Like the rest of Stay Gold, “East Coast Girl” is wistful and nostalgic and bright and big and beautiful. It’s the kind of song that can make it feel like summertime even in the dead of winter.

2017: All Time Low - “Last Young Renegade” (from Last Young Renegade)

I’ve been making “Summer of 20XX” playlists every year dating back to 2006. I recently went back and made a few playlists for earlier years, based on the songs I was listening to at the time. It’s fun to revisit those mixes now, to remember what life was like then and how it’s changed since. For a long time, I waited until the end of summer to make those playlists. It didn’t make sense, I reasoned, to make them earlier, when I maybe hadn’t heard all the great summer songs the season had to offer yet. A few years ago, though, I changed my strategy and started making my summer mixes on a “rolling” basis, adding new songs as they came along and eventually ending up with monster playlists of 30-40 songs. That way, I can enjoy the in-progress playlist throughout the season in question, but still end up with something that represents the entirety of summer. I was glad to have my summer playlist in 2017, in part because I wasn’t super fond of All Time Low’s Last Young Renegade as a full album. It was fine, and had a few good songs, but mostly saw the band gravitating toward a pop sound I didn’t love. The title track was the exception, a big, booming, redemptive piece of rock ‘n’ roll that hearkened back to the anthems of Springsteen and U2. I loved this song, and I loved revisiting it as a part of that “Summer of 2017” playlist over and over and over again. “Just a couple kids on a summer street/Chasing around to a flicker beat/Making mistakes that were made for us/We brushed them off like paper cuts,” goes the first verse. Right away, the song conjures up a vision of summertime romance so pure and youthful that you want to make it last forever. The love story doesn’t survive the second verse—“We used to be such a burning flame/But now we’re just smoke in the summer rain,” goes one of the lyrics—but every time the song hits its titanic chorus hook, it’s like reliving every whirlwind summer love you ever had.

2018: LANCO - “So Long (I Do)” (from Hallelujah Nights)

I’ve never anointed a song to “song of the summer” status as prematurely as I did with “So Long (I Do).” Usually, my song of the summer is a song I don’t actually hear until the summer in question. Not so with this song, which appears on an album that came out on the third release day of the year. Hallelujah Nights, the long-awaited debut album from country band LANCO, is a pure and joyful summer album. Songs like the title track and “Greatest Love Story” ache with the romantic possibility of hot nights under the stars out in the great wide open. I’m not sure why any band would release that kind of record in mid-January, but it’s a testament to how good a song “So Long (I Do)” is that it somehow stuck with me for six months to become my song of the summer for 2018. As northern Michigan slowly emerged from an endless winter and a ruthless bout with April snowstorms, I played this song constantly on drives or runs or evening walks, trying to summer the sun and the heat a little faster. On Independence Day, when I finally got to sing along with the song’s opening lyric—“Now every single summer on the Fourth of July/I think about you baby and I don’t know why”—on the Fourth of July, I felt the kind of unbridled joy that only the best songs can bring.