Someone Somewhere in Summertime

There is a particular quality to certain Simple Minds recordings from the early 1980s — a sense of enormous space, of sound that seems to exist inside a vast interior rather than a studio — and "Someone Somewhere in Summertime" achieves it more completely than almost anything in their catalog. The guitars are treated until they shimmer like heat haze, reverb trailing off into what sounds like an actual horizon. The rhythm section holds a steady, unhurried pulse while the arrangement builds and opens around it, never crowding the space but continually enriching it. Jim Kerr's vocal carries a yearning that is specific without being particular — he is reaching toward something he cannot name, and the song's genius is that you immediately recognize the feeling even if you've never experienced his circumstances. The lyric works in impressions rather than narrative, evoking summer as a state of consciousness rather than a season, connection as something glimpsed rather than held. It was recorded at a moment when the band stood between their angular post-punk origins and the stadium-filling ambitions ahead, and the tension of that position gives the song its emotional charge. Put it on during a long drive through countryside in late August, when the light is starting to go golden and you have the vague sensation that something important is either beginning or ending.