September

The opening notes are among the most recognizable in popular music — a guitar figure that functions as a kind of invitation, immediately establishing that whatever follows will be worth your time. What follows is nine members of a band operating as a single organism, a horn section that plays with the precision of a jazz ensemble and the joy of people who cannot believe how good this feels. Earth, Wind & Fire at their peak were doing something genuinely unusual: music of extreme technical sophistication that was also completely unpretentious, that wanted nothing more than for everyone in the room to feel it. The lyric is a memory of a specific night, a celebration of a specific moment, which gives the song its particular emotional character — it is nostalgic for joy, which makes it both melancholic and jubilant at once. Philip Bailey's falsetto floats above the arrangement like something that should not be physically possible. This is a late-summer song, end-of-the-party music, the kind of thing that gets played when no one wants the night to end. It carries the emotional weight of every good time you have ever had and didn't want to stop.