June 21, 2026

by Jacob Ganz

This week, NPR Music’s editor is welcoming summer with an iconic song that encapsulates one truth about the season: that it can fail to live up to our expectations somewhat spectacularly.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Greetings from late June, dear newsletter readers. What do you call the opposite of the dog days of summer? When you don’t feel any of the oppressiveness of the season, just its potential?

I’m writing from New York, the last in a parade of NPR Music teammates substituting over the last few weeks for your usual messenger Ann Powers, who has been away. This month has felt charmed in the city, for reasons historic (the Knicks ending their 53-year NBA championship drought has brought the city a glow that has not yet faded; days after they won the title I saw an astonishing Rosalía concert at Madison Square Garden) and entirely usual (the end of the school year, the lengthening and softening of days before the heat and humidity descend). It’s that part of springtime when summer feels like a promise just around the corner, all 10 toes hanging off the edge of the diving board, ready-or-not to splash into the next season.

But hesitate with me for just a moment. Because even as you’re anticipating the thrill of that summer feeling, part of you knows there’s a chance it’ll hurt a little, or the water might be cold, or you might make a fool of yourself. Lurking bummer is part of summer too. We all know it. And there are many songs written in honor of that truth, perhaps none more elemental than Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”

That early rock and roll classic is the subject of the latest episode of our podcast about old songs hosted by Ann along with NPR Music editor Daoud Tyler-Ameen. It comes out every other week for NPR+ subscribers. (If you aren’t a subscriber yet, might I suggest that now is a perfect time to dive in? It’s my favorite new podcast, impartiality be damned.) On each episode, Ann and Daoud detail how a song earned its place in culture and how it has managed to remain there over the years. They picked “Summertime Blues” because it set a template for so many songs that have followed: an anthem for a time of year when everything should be idyllic, if only life would stop getting in your way.

Cochran turned this setup into a rattling, boogie-ing rundown of minor misunderstandings that almost plays as a generation gap comedy, with his teenaged narrator on the receiving end of smackdowns from authorities ranging from his boss to his parents to his congressman. As Ann and Daoud note, the influence of “Summertime Blues” stretches across genres and generations — it may have provided inspiration for The Who in the 1960s as well as The Fresh Prince in the ‘80s.

And then there are songs like Pavement’s “Summer Babe” or Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” that fiddle with the summer bummer faders to produce something moodier or angrier or more existentially adrift. There might not be a cure for the summertime blues, but there are a million ways to wallow in it. Do you have a favorite? Write to nprmusic@npr.org and let us know.

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