Summers Remembered
If you've never been to Clearwater, Florida in the summer, here's the thing you have to understand: the air doesn't move. It just sits on you. By eight in the morning the pavement is already too hot to skate barefoot. By two in the afternoon you've given up on doing anything indoors because no air conditioning is going to make the day livable. So you wait. You ride out the worst of it. And then, somewhere around six or seven, the light starts to slant and the heat breaks just enough, and the entire town comes alive.
That's the moment this song is about. Those summers. That town. The version of me that was lucky enough to be young in it without knowing yet that "young in Clearwater in the mid-90s" was a thing I'd be writing songs about decades later.
We were skater kids. White tees soaked through within an hour. Khakis hanging loose. Undercuts. We rode Cleveland Street and Missouri Street like we owned them, because at that age and at that time, in that town, we did. Marlboros tucked in a back pocket. Coca-Cola from a gas station two blocks from where we were skating. Siamese Dream coming out of someone's speakers on Myrtle Ave — still in heavy rotation, still our soundtrack.
Pier lights calling, pulling us together Salt air stuck inside our skin.
There's a specific kind of light the pier throws on Clearwater Beach at night. If you've ever been there you know exactly what I mean. It pulls you toward it. You and your crew end up there because there's nowhere else to be. The catamaran's running until midnight back across the causeway. Coachman Park is dark off to the side. The Sandcastle is lit up. The water's flat. And nothing about any of it feels like it'll ever end, because at that age, in that summer, your imagination doesn't know how to picture an end.
That's the thing the song is trying to name. Not just the places — though the places are real and specific and mine — but the feeling of being inside a season of your life when you don't yet know it's a season. When you think this is just how it is. When you're not making memories on purpose because you don't know yet how much memory will end up mattering.
Hitchhike rides in the bed of a truck. No cell phones. Just the night and us. We figured it out as we went.
The line I keep coming back to is the closing one:
Still hear the wheels when I close my eyes Still feel the pavement pulling me in. Those were the summers I remember And they're still alive within.
That's the whole song in four lines. Still alive within. Those summers didn't end when the summer ended. They didn't end when I moved away from Florida. They didn't end when the skateboards got put away and the white tees got replaced with whatever came next. They went somewhere inside me, and they stayed there, and they're still there. Sound. Light. Salt air. The specific roll of urethane wheels on Clearwater pavement. All of it.
I put this song fourth on the album because by this point in Clearwater Nights, the listener has been through some weight — the haunted opener, the bright Oregon morning, and the cost of a darker chapter. Summers Remembered is the first time the album lets you sit somewhere unguarded. Just remember. Just be back there for a few minutes. And in a literal sense, this song is the source the album takes its name from. "Clearwater nights that wouldn't end." That's the line. That's where everything else on the record is in conversation with.
If you grew up anywhere in the 90s with a crew that felt like the whole world — if you spent summer nights with your friends in a town that's still inside you even though you don't live there anymore — Summers Remembered is for you. It's for anyone who was lucky enough to be young somewhere specific, and unlucky enough to only realize how lucky it was a long time later.
That's the song.
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