By admin 
My great-aunt Olga Mae, known to everyone she ever met as Olgie, asked me once if there would be guitars in Heaven. This was not long before she died, not that you’d have known it. She swore by apple-cider vinegar, drinking a few tablespoons mixed with water every day, and although she was eighty-six years old at the time and as thin as a Halloween skeleton, she could still sing just about any hymn from memory, and outdance everyone at V.F.W.s and fire halls in three counties. On Saturday nights, she and her husband of sixty years would throw their “sticks” into a little Ford station wagon and go hunting for a good bluegrass band.
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When Aunt Olgie asked me about guitars, I told her I thought the answer must be yes. Guitars, for me, are Heaven on earth—I mean the acoustic variety, played by pick and calloused fingers, not too loudly to hear a toe tapping out the time signature. You might already have concluded from all this that I don’t know much about the hottest songs of summer, this year’s or any other’s, but there is a summer song that I adore, with lyrics and lovely music that bring to mind my great-aunt Olgie.
“Something to Love” is the last song on the Alabama musician Jason Isbell’s sixth album, “The Nashville Sound,” from 2017. The album, recorded with his band, the 400 Unit, was one of Isbell’s most successful, selling well and winning a Grammy, and some of its songs have the feel of lightning bugs in a canning jar, capturing life circa almost any decade of this century or the last one. A few of those songs are truly perfect, including “Something to Love,” which makes me so happy that I had it played after my wedding, when my wife and I walked back up the aisle. Isbell wrote the song for his daughter, in sweet symmetry with “Outfit,” a song he released at the start of his career that catalogues his own father’s advice for him, everything from avoiding drugs to remembering to call relatives on their birthdays, a crescendo of regret and hope that peaks in a Shakespearean reminder, minus the “thine”s, to never be ashamed of who you are or where you come from.
“Outfit” is the sort of rough talk a workingman gives his son, but “Something to Love” is softer, the kind of prayer parents whisper to and for their children. You feel sure you’ve had the thought yourself the moment you hear Isbell sing the chorus: “I hope you find something to love / something to do when you feel like giving up, / a song to sing or a tale to tell, / something to love, it’ll serve you well.” That is the deep hope parents feel in everyday moments as well as existential ones, at a thousand bedtimes but also in the face of their children’s suffering and setbacks: the desire that these tiny creatures entrusted to us will grow up to be happy and fulfilled in whatever they do. I loved the song even before I had kids of my own, channelling the hopes my parents had for me, and hoping, too, for the family I’d someday have.
But “Something to Love” is an anthem of summer, not of child rearing. Isbell’s lyrics unfold in that long, leisurely way that the hottest months of the year do, recounting unhurried gatherings of friends and family. I am particularly susceptible to the song’s small-town charms because I grew up in a world similar to the one it describes. Like the singer, I was raised “with all my family around,” a cloud of witnesses like my Aunt Olgie who lived for Jesus Christ, Old Bay, Johnny Cash, and Pepsi-Cola. I can smell the Marlboro Reds and menthol Mores my uncles smoked and see the dust clouds behind cars on my grandmother’s mile-long dirt lane when I hear Isbell sing “We made music on the porch on Sunday nights: / old men with old guitars smoking Winston Lights, / old women harmonizing with the wind / singing softly to the Saviour like a friend.”
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Songs of summer are always nostalgic. In my childhood, the season began with asparagus and strawberries ready to harvest by the armful, then soybeans growing taller in the fields while the winter wheat turned its famous amber shades. It was Opening Day and then, before you knew it, Vacation Bible School and the Fourth of July; after that came the county fair and the local steam show, and you prayed they didn’t fall on the same weekend. If you were lucky, sometime between Memorial Day and Labor Day there was at least one trip to the ocean; either way, there were always crabs by the bushel and a few early mornings every week out on the water, waiting for the rockfish to bite.
Sunrise, sunset, no matter what the sun was doing, you were there to see it, whether from a porch swing or an aboveground pool, a lawn chair or a picnic table. “Something to Love” is a short song about a long season, about the precious and too-rare stretches of our lives that are dedicated to gathering together, with our families of origin and the families we’ve made ourselves. In addition to all the expressed hopes in the song, there’s an implied one as well: that life will give us our due measure of leisure, enough time to feel, however briefly, that time is plentiful. Or, better still, that time is irrelevant, the way it feels when we “count the stars at night” or find ourselves deeply absorbed in whatever or whomever we love.
For Isbell, that’s music. He’s been singing since he was six years old, barely big enough to hold the mandolin his grandfather gave him. For more than four decades, he has sung his way through drunkenness, addiction, hard-earned sobriety, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and parenthood, and he’s “still singing like that great speckled bird.” You don’t need to know the Book of Jeremiah or the King of Country Music Roy Acuff to love that line. It’s simply moving to know that Isbell is living the advice he gives his daughter: “Just find what makes you happy, girl, and do it till you’re gone.”
So many things make me happy, including this song, which I seem to be listening to on repeat this summer. I had it on the other night when I was pulling weeds in the garden, and the other day when I was mowing the grass; my daughters were dancing around the kitchen island to it while waiting for me to cook their pancakes the other morning. Isbell’s song has become like a memory of a memory, the collapsing sense of time present and time past and hopefully so much more time to come. I know that a song of summer is meant to be one you hear everywhere you go, which “Something to Love” never was and probably never will be, but I have an alternate definition: a song that makes you think of the sweetest season of your life. ♦
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