REVIEW: “Summer Ends” - but Dog Named Sally Will Keep it Alive For You
WRITTEN BY EITAN OHANA
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The duo’s debut track is a portal to a peaceful time
Seasons pass. They come and they go. Cyclically, they almost never bring with them any surprise or uncertainty. Each varies enough to not make it entirely necessary. The march of time goes on with or without us to witness or praise it. That’s the empirical truth.
Anecdotally, though? That’s another story. Seasons can be a state of mind, a moment captured in eternity. On “Summer Ends,” the debut single from indie lo-fi duo Dog Named Sally, members Lia Graham and Chris Pitts capture Americana in its purest idyllic form: barbecues, bicycles, ice cream and jean overalls.
The song transports you to Steven Spielberg’s dreamland without the threat of dinosaurs or extraterrestrial wonder of aliens. No, it’s tethered by the most painful kind of imagination - nostalgia. Across its 2:45 minute runtime, “Summer Ends” makes you long for that wonderful time in between summer and fall, where the heat isn’t unbearably scorching, but the atmosphere is still free, and the year, though more than halfway finished, feels at its youngest.
“I don’t want to be yours, I just want to waste some time,” Graham soothingly sings throughout the track. Recklessness or liberty, it doesn’t really matter. Summer is about belonging to your whims, being detached from anything that might go with you into the rest of the year.
Near the end, it asks the question of what will happen when summer ends, tapping into anxieties surrounding change. Before you get too down, however, the song quickly snaps into a lady speaking in that vintage aesthetic, which I can best describe by painting the picture of a mother in the 1950s listening to an ad on the radio while keeping an eye on her child playing in the pool. The song, then, is from the perspective of a teenager lounging on a noodle in that same pool, observing their surroundings.
If you need to close your eyes and get away from reality for a few minutes, Dog Named Sally warmly invites you to do so.
