I am, once again, writing this post with less than an hour left of the day. Old habits die hard I suppose. I never was particularly good at getting ahead on my work, even (maybe especially) on days like today, with zero plans or obligations. Oh well.
I’ve spoken about the presence of hope and optimism in august, and I’ve referred to the fact that everything in the song is tempered and opposed, or at the very least contrasted. In the case of optimism, the opposing number is delusion. The song is written as a retrospective1 and therefore has the benefit of hindsight, but it feels clear that there’s an element of delusion within the song’s events. The narrator has convinced herself that, despite the context, the romance will blossom and persist: “I remember thinking I had you”.
But as ever, reality eventually interferes. Part of august‘s beauty, and certainly a large part of its impact, are in its relatability; the universality of the experience of looking back and thinking, how did I ever believe that would work? The optimism only lasts a single verse: by the end of the chorus, the narrator acknowledges that “you were never mine”. Love and hope are interwoven with sadness, and maybe even regret, although this is less clear. After all, regret isn’t as simple as it sounds. It’s not enough to acknowledge that a course of action was based in delusion, or even that it led to a poor outcome. It’s possible to recognise all that, and also know, in your heart, that you’d make the same mistakes again, even with hindsight.
I don’t know how far in the past the events of the song are. The misty haze of the song’s sound make it feel like the events are fairly distant, but at the same time, the lyrics convey the events with such brutal clarity that one feels as though they have been often replayed in the narrator’s mind.
I’m running out of time, so I may need to revisit this one at a later date. I’ve also had a couple of additional ideas for future posts: I want to write about yearning and romantic asymmetry, in particular, so maybe that will be tomorrow’s piece. I think the comparison with cardigan is particularly interesting in this regard. [I’m putting this here partly as an aide memoire.]
- I think a lot about the fact that august, as a song, is only about the month of August, and is actually written from the perspective of *not* being in August any more, and how it feels kind of weird that it defines the month so strongly. I think I’ve already mentioned this, possibly in contrast to Get Lucky, but I can’t get over it. ↩︎