That's what HE said: The soundtrack for Summer 2012

Summer music, when it's good, makes me feel like I've
been here. In truth, I went NOWHERE this summer...

I have been making lists – and filling cassette tapes, then CDs, then iTunes playlists – of my favorite songs since the days when I would position my boom box in the best spot near a bedroom window in my house for good-as-it-will-get FM broadcast clarity, my fingers hovering millimeters above the silver metal buttons on the dual-deck cassette player like a candy-bar-juiced child with the mallet at Chuck-E-Cheese waiting to whack a mole, poised to depress both the play and record buttons simultaneously at the first downbeat of The Jets’ “Make It Real” to add to my “Top Tunes: Summer 1988” collection. My New Year’s Eve rituals back then were decidedly lame, as I would record, on a series of blank cassettes, each year’s top 40 songs of the year, just in case I’d have missed any during the previous months. This ritual made me anti-social but for the 2 minutes and 45 seconds or so in between the start and finish of these pop treasures, time that I was forced to share with peeing or throwing some more French onion dip on my paper plate. And oh, how I hated when the DJ’s on Z95 would talk over intros and outros to songs! I’m taping here, dammit!

All these years later, I have yet to outgrow my fascination with making lists, and am even further away from the day when I’ll no longer find sheer, life-giving joy in finding the perfect pop song to brighten up the most mundane moments in life, or the hottest of summer days. I have and will continue to love music in virtually every genre, and rarely discriminate in my annual search for the best ear worms of the season. And yes, I maintain to this day a fully-functioning tape deck component to my home stereo so that I can listen to “Mercedes Boy” whenever I feel like it.

By the time the summer of 2012 began, I had already grown tired of a number of songs that would have otherwise made a list of the most catchy summer tunes, including Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake,” Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” Nicki Minaj’s “Starships” and Maroon 5’s self-parody, “Payphone.” And since I spent most of my summer behind my steering wheel as dad chauffeur, I experienced on a daily basis the sonic waterboarding of “Turn on Radio Disney!,” slowly eroding my defenses until I’d formed a Stockholm syndrome-like fondness for “Chasing the Sun” by The Wanted, “One Thing” by One Direction, and “All Around the World” by Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris.

In an expanded playlist of 20 songs – which you know damn well I have already created in iTunes and am listening to right now – those child-chosen tracks are included. But in an effort to show some adult-like discipline and personal choice, here is my list of my favorite dozen tracks of the summer of 2012. Or baker’s dozen. Because you have to include “Call Me Maybe,” right?

1) Ed Sheeran – “The A Team”

Now for an A-team stylist...

Some red-headed British folk-soul goofball makes a wonderfully melodic acoustic ditty about a drug-addicted prostitute who’s complaining about how cold it is outside and even my 10-year-old daughter can’t help but sing along. The repetitive melody line and unrelated reference to one of my favorite TV shows of the 1980s aside, this song has a refreshing lyrical complexity (and a half-dozen end-rhymes with “pastries”!) and a compelling storytelling quality. I love it so much that I pirated the whole CD. Turns out this is the best track, and some of the songs I downright disliked, thus justifying the means by which I acquired the music. At least that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.

2) The Killers – “Runaways”

If there’s a list of rock front men I love so much that I occasionally grow confused about my…ahem…leanings, then Brandon Flowers is one of them. I am eight years older than him and I think want to be him (except for the Mormon part…happy Lutheran here, no offense). And I love The Killers so much that they could have released a cover of an Outfield song and I would have foamed over it, but “Runaways” is better than that. (Make no mistake…I loves me some Outfield!) I actually waited in the kitchen for the world-premiere spin on the radio of their first new material since 2008’s “Day and Age” (not including Flowers’ under-appreciated 2010 solo debut, “Flamingo,” one of my favorite albums of that year). The track was solid, classic Killers upon first listen, but no “All These Things That I’ve Done” or “Read My Mind.” But then came the Vegas magic of the repeat listen. It just gets better every time I hear it. See you in line at Best Buy on September 18 for “Battle Born.” And while I’m waiting, I think I’m going to take a late summer trip back to “Sam’s Town.”

3) George Michael – “White Light”

Don't let the lady eyebrows fool you.

George’s remake of New Order’s “True Faith” was his career near-death experience, which he followed up with a real-life brush with the other side, so after he recovered from severe pneumonia in the hospital, he recovered from over auto-tuning in the studio, learning how to use it to complement his still-wonderful voice instead of masking it. The result is this “comeback” track released on the 30th anniversary-to-the-day of Wham’s debut single, a somewhat generically clubby but lyrically literal homage to the adage “not dead yet.” There were few songs I waited less patiently to hear upon release, and what hits as little more than a solid track upon first listen builds in quality upon repeat listens. For a guy who’s been doing a lot of downbeat material in recent years, it might be one of his strongest dance tracks since “Fastlove.”

4) Adam Lambert – “Trespassing”

Don't let the lady eyebrows fool you.

Adam Lambert goes Queen. (I’ll wait…) But seriously, although Lambert is indeed the closest we currently have to Freddie Incarnate and is actually on the road with what remains of that band at this minute, this opening album cut to his sophomore pop disc of the same name knocks lead single “Never Close Our Eyes” – a killer cut in its own right – on its ass. With the fattest, slinkiest bass line since John Deacon’s “Another One Bites the Dust” funk fest and handclaps lifted from “We Will Rock You,” “Trespassing” sounds like it was originally recorded by an early-to-mid-80s Queen or a late-80s, Nile Rodgers-produced Duran Duran. Imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, and there are few songs this summer that made driving my car as much fun, never mind the punishment done to the stereo speakers. I simply dare you to resist it.

5) fun. – “Some Nights”

The vocal spirit of Freddie Mercury then leapt from Adam Lambert and into the larynx of fun. frontman Nate Ruess, thus compelling me to list this track immediately after “Tresspassing.” When Ruess starts the first verse lyric, “this is it boys, this is war” after the opening a cappella vocal stack and marching band percussion intro, tell me that you don’t hear Freddie. It’s uncanny. Yes, “We Are Young” featuring Janelle Monae was the smash hit single by the band, but I’m not including it here because it was already big enough in the spring to spawn YouTube cover parodies, months before the same thing happened to “Call Me Maybe.” And, for as anthemic as that song is, I was always drawn to this one, the album’s title track, which is far more bizarre and disjointed, but also more playful. Every summer needs a “what the hell are they singing about?” song, and for 2012, this is it. I have no idea what the hell is going on or how one lyric connects to the next, and I love it.

6) Eric Hutchinson – “Watching You Watch Him”

I have a known weakness for twenty-to-thirty-something, white singer-songwriter-poppy-guitar-strumming or piano-banging solo artists who fly under the radar. If you have never heard of Dave Barnes, Matt Nathanson or Jon McLaughlan, you might not know my type. So along comes a new name to add to my list, Eric Hutchinson, with the most sunny and upbeat song of relationship paranoia of the summer. Jealousy never sounded so breezy. In fact, this could possibly be the catchiest pop song on my entire list. And thank you, satellite radio, for turning me on to this one. How FM could be so stupid as to pass this up, I’ll never know. “I love you from the bottom of my heart,” Hutchinson sings in echo-bathed denial. Eric, I feel the same way about you.

7) Demi Lovato – “Give Your Heart a Break”

Thinking I was being nice to my daughter, I bought her the new Demi Lovato CD one day in Target after having heard “Skyscraper,” the most lovely, inspirational ballad by a Disney starlet since Miley Cyrus and “The Climb.” But just as Disney rejected Lovato for being too complex, independent and rough around the edges, so too did my daughter reject the CD, saying that she wasn’t interested in Demi any more, that fallen, self-injuring harlot of “Camp Rock” fame. So I took the CD for myself. And then this second single hit the radio and now my daughter wants it back. Sitting among a lot of Katy Perry and Rihanna and a bunch of new pop girls on the radio this summer (Kimbra? Sounds like something I made from a cigar box and popsicle sticks in fourth grade music class…), I thought this was the best straight-up pop song by a young female singer this season. Yup, even better than the inescapable you-know-what, though this list wouldn’t be complete without the inclusion of that track, too.

8) Glen Hansard – “Love Don’t Leave Me Waiting”

Yes, this looks like a Charles Schwab ad.

The summer began with the Broadway musical “Once” virtually sweeping the Tony Awards and then Glen Hansard, the male main character of that story and half of the Irish band of busking origins, The Swell Season, released his debut solo album, and it’s probably the album I’ve listened to the most as a whole work this summer (as opposed to listening to individual songs). It’s a stunner, filled with beautiful, contemplative lyrics and passionate vocal deliveries. And it provided my summer with the needed respite of music with adult-level maturity. I chose this track because it’s the first single and the one getting radio airplay, at least on WXRT, the only non-satellite station I’ll even listen to anymore if my kids aren’t in the car. It’s just a fantastic, slow-churning adult-rock track, and it’s arguably not even the best song on “Rhythm and Repose,” which you should pick up the next time you’re at Starbucks. It costs the same as that venti non-fat sugar-free vanilla light foam triple-shot latte you’ll order and will stick to your ribs a lot longer.

9) Green Day – “Oh Love”

Oh, Green Day. Welcome back. You are just as good when you’re writing about love as you are when you’re writing about politics. Probably even better. Please accept my apology for not adding tracks from “Dookie” to our playlist when I was the music director of my college radio station and said that your album lived up to its title. Your crunchy guitars and raw, plaintive Billy Joe vocals have shown me the error of my ways. This song is perfect in every Green Day-sort-of-way possible. I won’t be an American idiot ever again.

10) Passion Pit – “Take a Walk (The M Machine Remix)”

He said - take a WALK!

You can find this remix to the lead single from Passion Pit’s sophomore disc, “Gossamer,” on iTunes. I slightly prefer it to radio version; it’s got a much heavier bass groove, its beats so fresh and summery that only on repeat listens do you stop and ask yourself – “Hey, are these lyrics about the plight of an illegal immigrant? Are they intelligently dissecting the debt and investment crises over sunshine-y synths and a click-pop beat? ” I thought my love for Passion Pit’s first radio single, “Little Secrets,” was a fluke. Now I’m falling in love with them. Who knew that a song could make the reality of our economic debacle so palatable?

11) Mayer Hawthorne – “The Walk”

Talk about a summer breeze! One of the hot trends in music right now is this white-boys-doing-retro-soul thing, and I’m digging it. This summer featured other tracks in the genre by the likes of J.D. McPherson and Nick Waterhouse, but at the moment, my favorite is this track from Michigan-born Andrew Mayer Cohen, a DJ/producer/performer who goes by Mayer Hawthorne, possibly the only performer I can think of who truly took to heart the idea of taking your middle name and the name of the street you grew up on to create his…oh, that’s your porn star name…well, anyway… Combining the “woops” of the Temptations in between absolutely modern kiss-off lyrics, Hawthorne juxtaposes 70s soul with a current sensibility that keeps the track from being just an old-school soul copycat track. “The Walk” is the breakup song of the summer, from the guy’s point of view: “so long, you did me wrong.” Best lyric? “You’re shaped like an hourglass, but I think you’re time’s up.”

12) Per Gessle – “Dream On”

America forgot to visit Charm School the first time.

I struggled to pick the final track in my dozen, even putting this list aside for two days to think about it. I originally went with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street-meets-Dropkick Murphys Gaelic-stomping sequel to “My Hometown,” called “Death to My Hometown” from his brilliant “Wrecking Ball” disc. It’s been on constant rotation as I’ve prepped myself for the upcoming September concert which, I think, will provide me with my last act of preparation for the rapture. Then I went with “Guardian,” Alanis Morissette’s return to shimmering-verse, hammering-chorus form. But I finally settled on this track, though you have to admire how I snuck in the other two and, technically, expanded my list to 15, huh?

Per Gessle is the male half of Roxette, probably one of my top five all-time favorite pop bands. They’re a band that just sounds like summer, and one I never, ever gave up on even after their stateside popularity inexplicably waned following their “Pretty Woman” soundtrack superstardom and smash “Joyride” CD. I cannot figure out why Roxette didn’t maintain its popularity in the U.S., but they lost their American record deal, forcing me to pay in the mid $20s for imports of their last four studio albums and three hits collections, each of which contained at least a few songs as good as “Dressed for Success” and “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave).” What’s interesting here is that although Roxette just released a new CD a few months ago and is even returning to perform their first live dates in the U.S. in over a decade (though no Chicago stop…BOOO!!!!) this fall, the song that’s been lighting up a few of my favorite Sirius-XM stations is this track from their previous disc, 2011’s “Charm School.” Even more interesting, it’s not the fully-produced version of the track “Dream On,” co-vocaled in classic Roxette style by Marie Fredriksson, but the solo demo of the song recorded by Per and an acoustic guitar. I think I ultimately prefer the more Beatle-y, fully-produced version, but this stripped-down demo shines in its own right. I am praying that some sort of U.S. resurgence for Roxette is afoot. But mostly, this track truly connects my youth to my current self, a reminder that the songs of summer are forever.

13) Baker’s Dozen Bonus: Carly Rae Jepsen – “Call Me Maybe”

How can I not? What would you argue was a catchier song this year? This ubiquitous, omni-present, cross-cultural juggernaut is so infectious that I’m almost ready to stop trying to figure out how she missed him so bad before he came into her life. And whenever I think I’m sick of it, I look in the rearview mirror and find renewed joy in watching my children bopping in perfect rhythmic unison, not missing one word of the lyrics, never falling off pitch. If it’s good enough for Colin Powell, the U.S. swim team, and a host of others, it’s good enough for me.

Now that you've seen my list, head over to Uncomfortably Numb to find out what SHE said...