The Boys of Summer

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The Boys of Summer is a 1984 song by Don Henley .

Emergence

The song was recorded with synthesizers , a drum computer , bass and guitars . Mike Campbell , who was also responsible for the composition, contributed the eye-catching guitar part , while Henley wrote the lyrics.

It was published on October 29, 1984.

content

The text is about the memory of a lost love ("I never will forget those nights, I wonder if it was a dream. Remember how you made me crazy, remember how I made you scream. Well, I don't understand what happened to our love. ”), which the narrator, against his better judgment (“ those days are gone forever ”,“ don't look back, you can never look back ”) cannot forget (“ I still see you, your brown skin shining in the sun "). He promises that he will still wait for her when the summer is over: "I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong after the boys of summer have gone." The "summer" should be a metaphor for the ephemeral Happiness and youth can be understood, and "boys of summer" in US culture refers to the big league baseball players who don't play in autumn and winter.

In 1987, Henley explained in an interview with Rolling Stone that the main theme of the song was the lost youth, which also appears in the songs The End of the Innocence and Taking You Home .

Award

Henley won a Grammy for the song in 1986 for Best Male Vocal Performance - Rock.

In Rolling Stone's list of 500 best songs of all time , this song currently ranks 423.

Music video

The music video was directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino . The video was shot with black and white photography and shows Don Henley, a young boy and a teenager. While you hear the line “a little voice inside my head said don't look back, you can never look back”, you see three people (two in the background and one in front), before only two people were seen in the background. The boy in the video (played by Josh Paul) is somewhat similar to Henley in that Henley is also left-handed. The scene where the boy jumps up has been replaced with a scene from the movie Olympia . In a closing panel, the postmodern exposure of Henley's own work is realized as an ironic expression - if you saw the singer previously on a moving car, you now see this shot as a projection on a screen, from which a car moves away, with Henley at the wheel sits.

The music video was at the MTV Video Music Awards 1985 in the category Video of the Year award. It has been part of the Eagles' live repertoire since the band's reunification .

Cover versions (selection)

The song has been covered by a wide variety of performers, including:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Parke Puterbaugh: Don Henley: Building The Perfect Beast . In: Rolling Stone , January 31, 1985. Archived from the original on July 24, 2009. "... a wistful look over the shoulder at a faded summer romance." 
  2. ↑ Mikal Gilmore: Henley Interview 1987 Archived from the original on October 10, 2008. Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Rolling Stone . 512, No. 20th Anniversary Issue. "Beyond that, I'm also not convinced we really accomplished all that much. Kennedy was president and everybody thought it was Camelot, but look at what we did. We raised all that hell in the Sixties, and then what did we come up with in the Seventies? Nixon and Reagan. The country reverted right back into the hands it was in before. I don't think we changed a damn thing, frankly. That's what the last verse of 'The Boys of Summer' was about. I think our intentions were good, but the way we went about it was ridiculous. We thought we could change things by protesting and making firebombs and growing our hair long and wearing funny clothes. But we didn't follow through. After all our marching and shouting and screaming didn't work, we withdrew and became yuppies and got into the 'Me' Decade. "  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eaglesfans.com
  3. ^ Grammy Awards 1986 . awardsandshows.com. February 25, 1986. Retrieved August 1, 2013.
  4. ^ Archives of the Rolling Stone site on Web.Archive ( Memento from June 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ The Band . The Chris Daughtry fan listing. Retrieved October 21, 2013.
  6. ↑ Don Henley's stand-up performance takes top honor among MTV awards . In: The Dallas Morning News , September 15, 1985. "Don Henley, whose video Boys of Summer won the top honor at the MTV Video Music Awards, says he did little more during the making of the piece than stand in the rear of a pickup truck that was driven around Los Angeles. " 
  7. ↑ Steffen Hung: DJ Sammy - Boys Of Summer . charts.org.nz. Retrieved October 19, 2012.