Who knew there were so many Pavement songs beginning with the letter ‘S’? Feels like I’ve written about 20 of them. The number is probably much smaller than that. But it appears that this’ll be the last one in this section. And there’s an irony that the trend finishes off on an album opener, the first track on Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, the band’s debut album, released in 1992. I’ve relayed my personal opinion of the record in a previous post. Though if you’re not up for reading that, it boils down to me not liking the lo-fi feel of the album and preferring the songs on there a lot more when I see them being played live. It took seeing a live performance of ‘Perfume-V’ to get me into that number, and the story’s very much the same for my eventual appreciation of ‘Summer Babe’.

After downloading Slanted… in 2013 or so and not caring so much for it, there would be times when I was online and navigating various music places that ‘Summer Babe’ would be recognised as “one of the best songs of the ’90s” or “the greatest indie rock song ever”. It left me wondering what I’d missed. There was once a performance of the song the band did at the Hollywood Bowl, during their first reunion shows in 2010, available on YouTube. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be up anymore. That would have been a nice one to link. In fact, I think you can see the person filming that video in this video of the same performance. That’s as close as we can get to it. And there’s this take of the track from 2014 when Stephen Malkmus was on tour with his Jicks entourage. Listening to those, and then listening to the official album track afterwards, it was like, “Yeah, I get it now.” Sometimes it takes that live context to understand where a song’s coming from.

In comparison to those live shows where the track is performed with more of an emphatic energy and a wider display in vocal range, similar to the sound of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain which would follow (and which I’m more a fan of), ‘Summer Babe’ as a studio recording is much drier, with Stephen Malkmus sounding nonchalant as anything. But despite the production, or lack of it, whatever you want to say, I can’t look past its catchiness. Three chords is all it needs, revolving around a chord progression of D-A-G, over which Malkmus potentially sings about relationships while referencing Vanilla Ice and evoking images of shiny robes and protein delta strips. I say “potentially sings” because, like I’ve mentioned many a time before, Stephen Malkmus doesn’t make things too obvious with his words. I feel like I had to be around at the time of the song’s initial release to truly understand why the song gets the accolades it does. But I do enjoy it a lot. If I’m not singing along to the ‘summer babe’s during the end, I’m probably having a bad day.