“Summer Lover” by Until June, Monday, August 8, 2022 (Content warning: sexual content)

Until June's self-titled debut record is still available on streaming services. The band released the record in 2006 on the Christian record label Flicker Records, which was at that time distributed by Sony Music. Six years later, the band released their follow up, Young & Foolish on Madison Line Records. Then in 2014, the band ceased all activity, but never declared a break up. Currently, Young & Foolish is unavailable on streaming services.

IF YOU FALL FROM ME, WOULD YOU LOSE CONTROL? "Summer Lover" certainly isn't the first song about wanting more than a summer fling. Songs about falling in love while on vacation as you slip away from the friends or family you are there with only to be excited by someone new and interesting and unavailable in your current life situation make us sweat those tepid summer evenings away. The speaker of the song wants more than just a vacation, but there's also more to it. In this very short song, there's  a vague spiritual urgency for the listener's fidelity. Not only does he not want her to be only his summer lover, but also he wonders if she falls from him if she "will lose control?" If this were just as casual as we were led to believe from the airy rock guitars, we would probably say something like, "lighten up, dude. You probably should check your patriarchy at the front desk." But is this the whiny voice of God in this song? I can just picture the sermon title, "He wants more than a summer lover." He wants your whole heart. Let's hope that this is a spiritual relationship, because it kind of falls apart if it weren't, but it certainly doesn't go with a mujerist interpretation on scripture.  

I WANT MORE THAN A SUMMER LOVER. It all started with a sermon. It was probably the last sermon that I let myself take too seriously, when I thought that I could still fit into the stoic format. If I were faithful, somehow my life would feel fulfilled. I tried to fix things on my own, held myself back by dating the best I could, and in my case it was a guy who believed in God. I even insisted that we pray together on the phone at night, but was that before or after we jerked off together? But of course I was dating a man, having sex before marriage, and if it even mattered, he wasn't Seventh-day Adventist. And yet this relationship had become vapid as it was bound to become. A relationship based on physical touch when he had been put on an assignment that kept us apart for a long time. A language barrier. An age gap of about 15 years. A true lack of a sense of future. And yet he's kinda sorta Christian. I wanted more. I wanted not to feel alone. I wanted to enjoy the last of my twenties, uninhibited by a restrictive religion that told me to contort myself into something that was so foreign to my body, and for longing for what was natural for me was unattainable? Yet I feared the consequences. The STDs, the shame. So if I could stay faithful to my man, to my God, and just delete Grindr. But it was just too addictive.

Read “Summer Lover” by Until June on Genius.

Check out the song on SoundCloud.