A Short Song for a Long and Precious Season

But “Something to Love” is an anthem of summer, not of child rearing. Isbell’s lyrics unfold in that long, leisurely way that the hottest months of the year do, recounting unhurried gatherings of friends and family. I am particularly susceptible to the song’s small-town charms because I grew up in a world similar to the one it describes. Like the singer, I was raised “with all my family around,” a cloud of witnesses like my Aunt Olgie who lived for Jesus Christ, Old Bay, Johnny Cash, and Pepsi-Cola. I can smell the Marlboro Reds and menthol Mores my uncles smoked and see the dust clouds behind cars on my grandmother’s mile-long dirt lane when I hear Isbell sing “We made music on the porch on Sunday nights: / old men with old guitars smoking Winston Lights, / old women harmonizing with the wind / singing softly to the Saviour like a friend.”

Songs of summer are always nostalgic. In my childhood, the season began with asparagus and strawberries ready to harvest by the armful, then soybeans growing taller in the fields while the winter wheat turned its famous amber shades. It was Opening Day and then, before you knew it, Vacation Bible School and the Fourth of July; after that came the county fair and the local steam show, and you prayed they didn’t fall on the same weekend. If you were lucky, sometime between Memorial Day and Labor Day there was at least one trip to the ocean; either way, there were always crabs by the bushel and a few early mornings every week out on the water, waiting for the rockfish to bite.

Sunrise, sunset, no matter what the sun was doing, you were there to see it, whether from a porch swing or an aboveground pool, a lawn chair or a picnic table. “Something to Love” is a short song about a long season, about the precious and too-rare stretches of our lives that are dedicated to gathering together, with our families of origin and the families we’ve made ourselves. In addition to all the expressed hopes in the song, there’s an implied one as well: that life will give us our due measure of leisure, enough time to feel, however briefly, that time is plentiful. Or, better still, that time is irrelevant, the way it feels when we “count the stars at night” or find ourselves deeply absorbed in whatever or whomever we love.

For Isbell, that’s music. He’s been singing since he was six years old, barely big enough to hold the mandolin his grandfather gave him. For more than four decades, he has sung his way through drunkenness, addiction, hard-earned sobriety, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and parenthood, and he’s “still singing like that great speckled bird.” You don’t need to know the Book of Jeremiah or the King of Country Music Roy Acuff to love that line. It’s simply moving to know that Isbell is living the advice he gives his daughter: “Just find what makes you happy, girl, and do it till you’re gone.”

So many things make me happy, including this song, which I seem to be listening to on repeat this summer. I had it on the other night when I was pulling weeds in the garden, and the other day when I was mowing the grass; my daughters were dancing around the kitchen island to it while waiting for me to cook their pancakes the other morning. Isbell’s song has become like a memory of a memory, the collapsing sense of time present and time past and hopefully so much more time to come. I know that a song of summer is meant to be one you hear everywhere you go, which “Something to Love” never was and probably never will be, but I have an alternate definition: a song that makes you think of the sweetest season of your life. ♦