Song of the Summer

The only consensus regarding the 2025 Song of the Summer seems to be that there is no consensus regarding the 2025 Song of the Summer. No pop music hit has gripped the popular imagination the way, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” did in 2024 (even if some, like me, might contend that Carpenter’s 2025 track “Manchild” is superior.). The most popular song of the summer per Billboard metrics is “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, who is described by Wired’s Jason Parham as “a YouTuber and founding member of Hype House, the former collective of Gen Z TikTok stars,” which are words I don’t entirely understand. But despite that song’s “chart dominance,” as Parham notes, it “(doesn’t) really capture the spirit of the season.” (It also lives up to its title in the worst way, an incidental music anthem.) Parham also indicates that SoundCloud data has shown people listening a little more to old music than new music this summer. This is likely tied to TikTok and Instagram’s penchant for bringing back past hits, but might also be tied to “the changing cultural dominant” being driven by America’s President, one sort of seeking to install himself as our version of a Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, and causing people to seek, as pop critic Chris Molanphy has deemed it, musical “comfort food.” I can relate. 

Bruce Springsteen, who you may remember me mentioning once or twice on this nominal movie blog, released a box set of seven albums of unreleased material in June. Most of these were not even random compilations of never-heard songs but full-fledged records that were cut and then shelved for various reasons, including the “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions, one that Bruce very nearly put out in 1994. In the hardcore Boss circles, this album had been known as the loops record, so-called because it was said to consist of songs based around programmed drumbeats and samples. (That turns out to be half true.) And though at the time Springsteen was reticent to release it for what would have been his third consecutive record focusing on relationships, and while it predictably can’t compare to his unrivaled seven-album run from late 1973 through 1987, it’s still quite good, as good, in fact, as anything he has released in the new century. If it had been released in 1994, I suspect it would have received mixed reviews before eventually being reclaimed like some of the less-heralded Bob Dylan albums, say “Oh Mercy.” 

They are far from spitting images but still, but I kept thinking of the “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions as a Springsteen version of “Pure Moods,” the compilation of new age music that was released in 1994 and that it seemed like everyone I knew bought that summer. But then, new age music is intended to soothe, and though the SOPS sometimes has soothing melodies, the lyrics are mostly anything but, a juxtaposition that Springsteen works to fine effect, like “Between Heaven and Earth,” or “We Fell Down” which truly conveys the sense of something beautiful ending. It also underlines his eschewing the short story set to music mode of 1995’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” for more suggestive lyrics. He gets great mileage from the metaphor of the lead track “Blind Spot,” turns “The Little Things” into a musical manifestation of that barbed wire melded into a heart that Neil gave his girlfriend on Real World London* (*mid-90s reference, so appropriate if obscure), and “Waiting On the End of the World” comes across like both a more abstract and more specific version of “Streets of Philadelphia.” Even the record’s single rocker, “One Beautiful Morning,” is essentially an uplifting celebration of death. One song, however, stands above the rest.

“Maybe I Don’t Know You” sounds ominous from the start, and in the first two verses, Springsteen sings from the point-of-view of a husband puzzled by his wife’s seemingly newfound taste, in clothes, in music. “What’s that song you’re listening to, baby?” he sings. “I never heard you listening to that before.” (Every time I hear this lyric, I imagine Patti Scialfa in the other room listening to TLC’s “What About Your Friends.”) “Is it something new,” he wonders, “or just something you always hid?” And that leaves him wondering if he doesn’t know her like he thought he did. Springsteen, though, is no unthinking meathead, and his protagonist is not Ray Barone singing to Debra Barone. No, in the bridge, the protagonist turns introspective, confessing how she came to him for “understanding and tenderness,” but he met her with “indifference.” She wasn’t hiding these things from him, necessarily; in his stated apathy, he just wasn’t paying attention. But why wasn’t he paying attention? He explains, sort of: “And I can’t explain.” And though that’s a copout, of course, Springsteen knows it and, well, here’s the thing:

Springsteen songs are not usually about the guitar solo. There’s a reason what might be the most beloved guitar solo in the Springsteen canon is, in fact, played by Nils Lofgren. But when his solos work best, it’s because they truly conversate with the song, like on “Streets of Fire” where the solo seems to erupt like molten lava from the somber melody. The solo on “Maybe I Don’t Know You” doesn’t erupt, it’s not that kind of song, but it feels fully connected to the line preceding it. The solo itself becomes his explanation, or more accurately, his lack of one, this beautiful, pitiful cry of a man who can’t communicate, underlined in his stretching out the pronoun “I” twice as the solo winds up, like he’s gathering himself to finally explain and just...can’t. As the song concludes, you realize, it’s not whether he knows her, because he doesn’t even know himself, and I can’t help but think that such existential failure is a pretty apt illumination of where America stands as the curtain closes on the summer of 2025.