Nothing Ever Lasts Forever: Songs for the Last Days of Summer
Summer doesn’t really end all at once, does it? The days are still hot, and no one has put away the swimsuits or lawn chairs just yet. But the telltale signs have begun to appear. School-supply lists are posted online and in local stores. Announcements about backpack drives and back-to-school bashes fill social media feeds. In school parking lots and on practice fields, brass and woodwind players send scales dancing through the summer air, color guard flags snap in the breeze, and percussion cadences mark time beneath the drum majors’ sweeping hands.
Yes, the calendar may say summer, and the weather certainly still does, but something has begun to change. The sun sets a little earlier. The lake isn’t quite as crowded. Then, one morning, the air feels different, and the breeze is just a tiny bit cooler.
Summer is still here … just not for much longer.
These songs accompany summer on its way out. The playlist starts with summer still shining, then moves into memory, distance, and that little ache that comes with knowing something good can’t stay. Some of the songs name the season; others just sound like the moment when today starts turning into something we’ll remember later.
“Midnight Sun” by Zara Larsson
“Midnight Sun” starts us off in full light. It was inspired by Swedish summers, when the sun barely sets and the night feels as if it could keep going forever.
You don’t have to live near the Arctic Circle to understand the feeling. It’s that last stretch of summer when the night is still warm, no one’s tired and no one wants to go home yet.
“Magic” by The Cars
Nothing wistful here. Not yet.
“Magic” gives us one more pool party, one more crazy summer afternoon, and a ton of summer fun with someone we love. It also gives us The Cars’ lead singer, Ric Ocasek, walking on Plexiglas “water” in the wonderfully strange music video.
It wasn’t actual magic, but it was early MTV. Close enough. Before we start missing summer, let’s give it one last chance to be fun.
“Summer Breeze” by Seals & Crofts
Too obvious? Maybe so. Sorry, not sorry.
“Summer Breeze” is warm air, open windows, jasmine and the feeling that summer might just keep going. It’s also the last completely uncomplicated moment on this playlist.
Later songs will know better. For now, let’s leave the windows open.
“august” by Taylor Swift
By this point, summer has already started becoming a story someone tells afterward.
“august” is one part of the teenage love triangle running through Taylor Swift’s folklore. This is the story from Augustine’s side. She believed the relationship meant more than it did, and now the whole thing has been reduced to a few intense weeks she can’t get back.
The music gets bigger. The relationship doesn’t.
That’s where it hurts.
“Suddenly Last Summer” by The Motels
The important word here may be “suddenly.” Seasons can change that way. So can relationships.
One day, everything still feels current. The next, we’re calling it last summer.
Somewhere, there’s a copy of Little Robbers that didn’t survive the cassette era. (Ask me how I know!) It wasn’t skipped or scratched. It was played, rewound and played again until the tape finally gave out. For listeners of a certain age, this was that kind of song.
Motels lead singer Martha Davis once connected the end of summer with hearing the ice-cream truck pass for the last time and realizing it wouldn’t be back. But there’s something much heavier underneath the song. Davis wrote it after both of her parents had died … her mother by suicide and her father after an illness.
Knowing that makes the song hit differently. This isn’t just a summer romance ending. It’s that moment when life separates itself into before and after.
“End of Beginning” by Djo
OK, so it’s not technically a summer song. But hear me out: it still belongs.
“End of Beginning” is about returning home and meeting an earlier version of yourself in a place that still remembers you.
The end of summer can feel like that. Nothing dramatic has happened. The streets look the same. Life is simply moving on, whether everyone involved is ready or not.
Even if you discovered the song recently, it already sounds like an old photograph.
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears
This song shouldn’t sound as carefree as it does. The music is made for an open road, but there’s plenty of uneasiness moving underneath it. Power. Ambition. War. You know … the usual light summer subjects. In fact, the song originally had a much less carefree working title: “Everybody Wants to Go to War.” (Good call, changing that one!)
For me, there was a summer job in 1985 that came with a delivery route, plenty of stoplights, and this song coming out of every car radio.
You don’t choose the song that becomes attached to a certain time in your life. It just happens. One drive at a time, the song collects the whole season. Read the comments beneath the official video on YouTube, and you’ll find people attaching the song to sunny mornings, school days, car radios and the last day of high school. Some remember hearing it when it was new. Others weren’t born yet and feel nostalgic anyway.
“This is more than a song … This is the sound of being alive.”
Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.
“Summer Skin” by Death Cab for Cutie
The tan fades. School starts again. Two people who seemed inseparable in July discover that the relationship may have belonged to the season as much as it belonged to them.
“Summer Skin” doesn’t make a big scene out of the breakup. That makes it feel more honest. Not every relationship ends with a fight. Sometimes people just return to their regular lives and realize something has gone missing.
“A Little More Summertime” by Jason Aldean
By September, the beach town has emptied and the sky has gone gray. The narrator knows the relationship is over, but he bargains with the season anyway. Maybe a few more warm days would’ve made her stay.
Probably not. But that’s not really the point.
After several songs that circle around memory and change, “A Little More Summertime” comes right out and says what the heart wants.
Not forever. Just a little longer.
“The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley
Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers wrote the music for “The Boys of Summer” and offered it to Tom Petty. Petty decided it didn’t fit the album they were making, so Campbell took it to Don Henley instead. Henley added the lyrics and turned it into one of rock’s greatest rearview-mirror songs.
Tom Petty later admitted that he regretted passing on it. Fair enough. “The Boys of Summer” is one of those songs that never seems to wear out. Ever.
For me, this song lives permanently on a six-hour drive home from college … playing somewhere between one life and the one before it, and when the road seemed to stretch out longer than any summer did.
The beach is empty. The relationship is over. The memory, however, remains forever.
“The Last Day of Summer” by The Cure
“The Last Day of Summer” moves slowly, and it doesn’t try to make the goodbye easier. This isn’t packing up the lawn chairs and heading home after Labor Day. It’s the realization that an entire part of life may be over.
There’s no soft landing here.
“Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell wrote “Urge for Going” in the mid-1960s, but her own studio recording wasn’t released until 1972. By then, other artists had already figured out what she had written: one of the clearest descriptions of summer and fall being overtaken by cold. Frost arrives. Warmth retreats. Winter is coming, and a melancholy fills the air.
Mitchell wrote “Urge for Going” out of a desire to escape the cold for someplace warmer. But calling it merely a song about winter misses something. The urge is bigger than the season. It’s the wish to leave, to follow the warmth or simply to be anywhere but here.
I call it hauntingly beautiful.
“Summer’s End” by John Prine
“Summer’s end’s around the bend, just flying / The swimming suits are on the line, just drying.”
The music and lyrics to “Summer’s End” are gentle, but its meaning isn’t small.
Prine’s official video depicts the story of a family touched by the opioid crisis. The video was dedicated to Max Barry, the son of former Nashville mayor Megan Barry. Max — who Prine considered a part of his extended family — died in 2017 due to a combination of drugs, including opioids. Prine performed at his memorial.
Summer ends. People lose their way. But Prine offers comfort and hope:
“No you don’t have to be alone,
Just come on home.”
By the time we reach “Summer’s End,” the open windows and easy warmth of “Summer Breeze” feel far behind us. Summer didn’t disappear all at once. It slipped away song by song, until suddenly we’re remembering it instead of living it.
But when we want a little of it back, we can always play the songs.
Just come on home.
