Premiere: Low Hums's "Last Days Of The Summer"

Premiere: Low Hums’s “Last Days Of The Summer”

Release date: Friday, August 30th

Premiere: Low Hums’s “Last Days Of The Summer” August 30, 20191 Comment

Dan Ray

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo courtesy of Low Hums // Photo by Sanoj Sniksah

Years ago, at the end of the summer, Low Hums frontman Jonas Haskins was sitting in his backyard in Wallingford, drinking a beer, watching the flowers wilt back to the dirt they came from when a song trickled out of him. Recorded onto a 4-track, the tune — much like the flowers — was then left to die in the summer sun, awaiting its next bloom.

On Zzyzx — Low Hums’s fifth full-length album which gets its name from a California town where guitarist Miles Panto’s Space Cruiser van once broke down — spring has come for that once-forgotten track. Today, Dan’s Tunes is excited to premiere “Last Days Of Summer,” Low Hums’s first single from the upcoming album.

The rediscovery and subsequent production of “Last Days Of Summer,” feels especially apt for the end-of-summer 2019. While, obviously, a track called “Last Days Of Summer” dropping on August 30th is seasonable, with lyrics like “everyone is lying in the harvest sun / everything is dying in the harvest sun,” this tune also feels especially poignant and relatable to our current climate crisis. What may have been a carefree, groovy, psych-rock trip when it was originally written becomes both a celebration of how “the sunshine was true and the sky was blue” and a reminder of how “everything is dying in the harvest sun” in its rebirth.

The track itself is a spacey, psychedelic romp that will truly make you feel like you’re floating on your back down a lazy river, brown cattails hovering on either side of you as you push your sunnies up your nose and take another sip of your beer that’s magically floating alongside you. Haskins perfectly captures that end-of-season, drenched-in-sun moment right before, as he puts it, “[everyone] in Seattle break[s] out our sweaters!”

Before you go digging for your winter clothes, grab a six-pack and your paddle board, head to the water, and listen to the track below. Then, keep the summer spirit rolling right through the rainy season with Zzyzx, out November 8th.