Summer Sons

Product Information

It’s also more bittersweet than you may remember: The singer’s doing a pretty good job of messing his life up, though the tropical sound suggests he’ll get by.

Summer Sons - Kindle edition by Mandelo, Lee. Literature

While Olaf from Frozen seems like the worst mascot for summer, he sure knows how to sum up the season in a striking Broadway-esque song. Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost. And no song has such raucous, youthful spirit as Alice Cooper on “School’s Out”, which was released in May 1972.

To any fan of The Karate Kid –in which this icily funky 1983 dance-pop hit soundtracked Daniel LaRusso’s disastrous attempt to fit in at his new high school –‘Cruel Summer’ will forever symbolize those sweltering dog days when the sun’s beating down and you just can’t catch a break. Sure, there are artists whose music can be described as ‘autumnal’ or ‘wintry,’ but no musician has ever competed to have ‘the song of spring. It went to number two in the charts, its upbeat throb one of the signatures, along with Geri Halliwell leaving the Spice Girls and David Beckham’s tears, of the summer of 1998. A humungous riff, an embryonic rap-metal chorus and a Seventies TV thriller-pastiching video that felt as deliciously retro as box-fresh Adidas.

Lee Mandelo (Author of Summer Sons) - Goodreads

When two of hip-hop's reigning queens declare it to be ‘Hot Girl Summer,’ then dammit it's hot girl summer. Sung in his deep, rum-soaked rumble and with those bursts of brass giving the track some additional sunshine, Ezra urges listeners to stop worrying and just kick back for a bit. A high-pitched laugh, a drum fill that inspired thousands of kids to annoy parents at the dinner table and an instantly recognizable guitar riff: This is how you start a song. After enough listens, it's impossible not to agree, whether your ‘herre’ is a sweaty club, a hot summer night or, the argument could be made, anywhere on our globally warming earth.That said, the glimpses of departmental infighting and grad student exploitation strike true, and Andrew’s racing and partying lifestyle feels like a classic procrastinator’s response to institutional responsibility, with the pressure continually mounting. The majority of summer songs are about cutting loose, hitting the streets, and other winsome activities, but Eddie Cochran created a song for all those who have to work for the man all season long. Summer songs and hot-girl songs have gone together for so long that it’s about time one of those girls wrote one herself.