Icelandic State Park Primitive Campsite ($25 with daily admission fee)
Outside Cavalier, North Dakota
September 3, 2024
1. Earth, Wind & Fire: “September”
Ever since its 1978 release, people have wondered about the significance of Sept. 21, the specific date this song commemorates. A decade ago, its co-writer Allee Willis admitted to NPR that there was no deeper meaning: “We went through all the dates,” she said. “‘Do you remember the first, the second, the third, the fourth’ … and the one that just felt the best was the 21st.” In recent years, the comedian Demi Adejuyigbe made an annual series of increasingly high-concept videos honoring the arrival of this hallowed date; that Earth, Wind & Fire simply chose Sept. 21 because of the way it sounds only makes these odes to banality even funnier.
2. Big Star: “September Gurls”
I would be remiss if I did not include this autumnal gem from one of my all-time favorite bands, the power-pop cult heroes Big Star. “December boy’s got it bad,” the frontman Alex Chilton (a Capricorn) sings on this bittersweet ode to juggling relationships with multiple Libras — one of the band’s finest and most succinctly perfect songs.
3. Felt: “September Lady”
The jangly English indie-rock band Felt made quintessentially autumnal music, and the mononymous frontman Lawrence seems to have acknowledged this by including, on Felt’s great 1986 album “Forever Breathes the Lonely World,” a lightly melancholic song called “September Lady.” Amid lush backing vocals, chiming guitars and playful tempo changes, he sings of a minor romantic disappointment: “September lady’s just not for you/You can try someone new.”
4. Fiona Apple: “Pale September”
Many of the songs on Fiona Apple’s striking 1996 debut, “Tidal,” sound like long-forgotten jazz standards, but all were written by the precocious Apple when she was just a teenager. She imbues this piano ballad with a sophistication well beyond her years.
5. Barry White: “September When I First Met You”
Released the same year as Earth, Wind & Fire’s classic, this tune from Barry White’s 1978 album “The Man” also makes use of the trusty September/remember rhyme scheme, here employed as a hypnotic backing vocal that recurs throughout the sensuous, mid-tempo track.
6. Frank Sinatra: “The September of My Years”
Recorded and released shortly before his 50th birthday, Frank Sinatra’s ruminative, orchestral 1965 release “September of My Years” is a kind of concept album about middle age. (Its songs include “How Old Am I?” and the classic “It Was a Very Good Year.”) For all the poignancy of the title track, Sinatra does not experience this metaphorical September as a cold season: “I find that I’m sighing softly as I near September,” he sings. “The warm September of my years.”
7. Green Day: “Wake Me Up When September Ends”
The played-out memes that recur each year on Oct. 1 — somebody wake up Billie Joe Armstrong! — disregard the personal pathos at the heart of this song, from Green Day’s hit 2004 album “American Idiot.” Armstrong wrote the punky power-ballad about his father, who died in September 1982, when the Green Day frontman was 10. The small changes that unfold across the song’s verses — from “seven years has gone so fast” to, eventually, 20 — suggest the calendar’s cycle of renewal and remembrance. Each subsequent September is, somehow, both a fresh start and a resonant echo of the past.
Bonus Tracks
The Bangles included a reverent cover of “September Gurls” on their hit 1988 album “Different Light.” Good for Alex Chilton, getting those “Walk Like an Egyptian”-adjacent royalties.
Also, I decided to limit the playlist to just one Frank Sinatra tune, but he also did a heck of a “September in the Rain.”
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