Don Henley - The Boys of Summer

The Boys of Summer is a song by Don Henley, who was one of The Eagles.



It is one of the most evocative musical soundscapes not only in rock music, but in all of music. The music was written, apparently, by Mike Campbell. Henley’s guitar, echoed and repeated, with its seagull cries, conjured up long empty beaches at the start of autumn, with a sense of nostalgia for the summer, but also a deeper sense of loss.

The song is about a man who wants to get his woman back. She has left him for the younger, more exciting and temporary lovers she meets in the summer.

It’s the song with one of the more famous lines in rock music:

Out on the road today
I saw a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said
Don’t look back you can never look back
Thought I knew what love was
What did I know
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but..

That image of a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac went straight into the pop-culture and describes a certain way of selling out: comfortable, complacent, and successfully. Sell out like that and there is no going back.

But the verse isn’t about that. It’s about the way the Dead-Head sticker jogs the singer into realising that he can’t go back to her. Intellectually, he knows he can’t. Emotionally, as the ‘but’ leading to the final chorus suggests, he can’t stop himself from wanting to try.

Blue-Pill Oneitis chump. Yo, bro, bitch be a ho, you don’t want to know her ass no mo’. Or if you want some Blue-Pill spirituality with that: he has to realise that she is on her own path, and has a right to go whichever way she wants, and he has to let her go with love. Same advice: stop stalking, quit whining, get over it, get back into another saddle. (Insofar as the singer blames himself for her loss of interest, there’s an undeniable Blue Pill streak in the lyrics. But at least he’s not simping.)

But the song is not about his attempts to get her back. He hasn’t started yet. He’s still thinking, or dreaming, about it. The song is an acknowledgement of the strength of feelings that he knows would be pointless to act on.

And that explains why the song has a drive and edge that we would not expect from what should be a blues or a romantic lament. The music is not only a soundscape intended to evoke summer’s end in a small beach town, it’s intended to portray the force of his emotional dilemma.