Summer is over.
I don’t know about you, but I was in denial until today. Until today, when it’s been raining all day, the sun never came out from behind the clouds, and there’s that chill in the air that you haven’t felt in a while but you know is going to be sticking around. You definitely know summer is over when you don’t actually need the stocking cap yet, but it might feel nice? (I have a stocking cap on right now, lol.)
I was in Arizona for a few days last week, where summer definitely wasn’t over—and maybe it never is, maybe that’s the appeal. In the last gasps of my summer-isn’t-over denial, I went out with a group to a dueling pianos bar for a friend’s birthday. This place attracted an interesting crowd. There was a group from Wisconsin who were together for a family reunion, there were three different groups celebrating birthdays, there were some families out to dinner with their kids, there were some couples on dates, and then there was the table next to us, some gals who were befriending gentleman who were slipping $20s into their hands. Maybe it was for the songs… ;)
Anyway, that’s the crowd. Requests came in for artists you might expect—Elton John, The Eagles, The Killers, Def Leppard, Journey. All you need is a Venmo request and a little faith that the musicians will play your song of choice. Pay to play. Pay more and your song might get played sooner. You start doing the math and quickly realize these guys are making a pretty nice chunk of change. But you also start to get the impression this job has annoying aspects. Namely: People request the same songs night after night after night. The guys were visibly less enthusiastic for some songs than others. Once I noticed this dynamic, I vowed to request a good song—a song the musicians like and the crowd knows and, as importantly, that I want to hear.
↓↓↓ What song(s) would you request in my situation? ↓↓↓
I observed the crowd, thought for a bit and landed on my first choice: Surrender by Cheap Trick. I’d say it was a slight-to-moderate miss. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the hit I was chasing. I definitely didn’t get the impression they hated playing this song, but ehhh, I would’ve liked to see a little more pep in the performance.
So I thought for a bit and came up with a song selection I thought might better check all the boxes: Take it on the Run by R.E.O. Speedwagon.
The summer of R.E.O. Speedwagon
It’s been a summer of R.E.O. Speedwagon. Why? I have no fucking clue.
I’m the type of person who often has a song or two that’s on heavy rotation or stuck in my head. Or both. Some lyrics speak to something I’m thinking about a lot, though that’s certainly not universally the case. Songs in heavy rotation for me this summer span genres and topics. Still, usually the earworm songs are relevant for at least some reason—they’re popular, they were in a show/movie I watched, or they’re an old favorite I’ve rediscovered. Not so with R.E.O.
The next several paragraphs are going to shriek of, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks,” but I’m not actually that familiar with R.E.O. Speedwagon. I barely know anything about the band (are they from Boston?). I’ve never owned an R.E.O. Speedwagon album. I’ve never been to a concert. I don’t know the names of anyone in the group. It’s plausible I’ve been missing out this whole time.
Back when R.E.O. Speedwagon started getting into heavy rotation, it was more than a little confusing. Why was Take it on the Run stuck in my head? My best guess is one of the songs popped onto my radar when I went through a weekslong period when I was listening to the Wildflowers album by Tom Petty a lot. I’ve had this sort of thing happen before: One summer I had Reunited by Peaches & Herb stuck in my head for weeks. Weeks. I barely knew that song before that bout of earworm.
This summer it was Take it on the Run and Keep on Loving You.
As part of the song-stuck-in-my-head process, I naturally had to go look up the videos for these songs. Pure 1980s gold.
Does anyone else do shit like this? Just me?
Before you know it, the algorithms have ahold of you watching a few R.E.O. Speedwagon videos a few times and it all spirals from there. YouTube keeps pumping out more and more R.E.O. suggestions until you’ve plausibly reached your limit—they’re designed to give you what you want, right?!—and you can’t escape the ‘wagon.
The summer that was
How was your summer? Did this summer feel long to you—not long enough, maybe—but long in the sense that you packed a lot into that time? That’s how it felt to me. My summer was great, thanks for asking, if a bit strange. A U-shape of sorts. I started the summer with a job. With a boss. With a regular paycheck. I ended the summer self-employed and with a glimmer of confidence there’s enough work out there to sustain me—and work I actually might want to do, something that wasn’t always obvious throughout the summer. The media industry is shedding jobs like crazy. A report in June indicated that 2023 had the highest-year-to-date cuts on record. That said, I can’t really blame a tougher industry for why I wasn’t out there chasing down new work. Rather, I kept catching myself questioning whether it’s time to do something else. But what would that something else be? Sigh.
The number of working journalists I know dwindles year after year. One of my journalist friends—a friend who won an award for her reporting last year!—told me over the summer she’s done. Sigh. At least she’s going to keep writing. (Fiction!)
Even as career questions were pinging around in my head, it wasn’t the more apt Tom Petty songs—Time to Move On, say, or Wake Up Time—that were on repeat. Nope, during a summer when I was plagued by ennui, my speaker kept belting out love ballads from the 1980s. Someone with a psychology degree could probably make better sense of this than I can.
Back at the dueling pianos bar
Four days in Arizona proved to be a pretty solid belated end to summer. Before that trip, I told a few people I was struggling motivation-wise. Being under-employed in the summer feels kinda fun but it feels a lot less fun when the leaves are falling off trees and you’re staring down a winter that seems poised to arrive any minute. Being stressed out about money and work in the winter definitely doesn’t sound like fun.
The trip itself helped, but I had also started feeling a tiny bit more motivated to earn money to pay for said trip. Funny how that works. While away, a story I’d pitched back in 2022 (!) finally published. The delay was entirely my fault; I’d pitched the story, I’d been excited to write the story, and then I never wrote it for the dumbest of reasons and the editors never shook me down about it. It kept annoying me I had ditched that story and one day, I reckoned I had nothing to lose, so I went groveling back to my editors to see if they’d still like me to write it—and they did! Victory! That’s the weird type of win you sometimes need.
By last Saturday, I was getting ready to get back in the swing of things post-vacation. I had some ideas swirling in my head. I had a more obvious sense of motivation again. So even though the night was to celebrate my friend’s birthday, it also felt a little bit like I was celebrating being back in a certain mindset again.
Only a few minutes after I’d requested Take it on the Run, the older of the two pianists sat down at the main piano and started playing and singing the now-familiar lyrics, “Heard it from a friend who…”
I turned to my group, excitedly announcing: “I requested this one!”
I then watched as this guy gave it his all for the entire song. He played every note. He sang every line. For those uninitiated with dueling pianos culture, they don’t do that with some of the longer songs. (Take it on the Run clocks in at 4:00.)
He played out the final notes of the song and he finished singing: “…heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another you been messin' around.”
As he took his hands off the piano, he leaned into the microphone, smiled slightly, and said: “Great song.”