Sweet summer tunes....

August is here, the back to school clothes are in the catalogs…before summer is over I want to mention a few good, fizzy summer songs I’m diggin’ right now. I had a rental car a few weeks ago and inevitably the station pre-sets were all at top 40 stations. I thought to myself, let’s see what’s happening outside of my little world, and listened for a while as I drove. Ouch. Auto-tune, R&B wailings, growling, doofusy Nickelback…and then I heard The Ting Tings’ “That’s Not My Name”. At first I was derisive, but once that super stoopid yet catchy chorus kicked in,
“They call me hell / They call me Stacy / They call me her / They call me Jane”,I was a goner. It's the way she says "STAY-cee" and the intricate girl/girl harmonies that embellish the end of the song. That set off my taste buds for more sugar. Somewhere, I heard The New Young Pony Club’s “Ice Cream” and that also made my heart go pitter pat:

“I can give you what you want. I can make your heart beat short. I can make you ice cream We could be a sweet team Melting in your vice dreams, sport.”
It’s British and sassy and young. I loved it. So I got those off of iTunes, and also added in Tegan and Sara’s “Back in Your Head”. I heard that song last year when I was in a cheap accessories store, trying to figure out if a necklace with a plastic strawberry on it was appropriate for a 46 year old library director, and it lodged in my brain, its little piano notes and the plaintive “run run run” part. I had half-remembered it as “I Just Want You In My Head”, and had no idea it was Tegan and Sara, so I looked fruitlessly for it on iTunes for a while. Fruit! That’s it. These songs are like having a bowl full of ripe apricots, ready to eat.