Summer Days

"Summer Days" is an uptempo twelve-bar blues/rockabilly song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan that appears as the third song on his 2001 album Love and Theft. It was anthologized on the compilation album The Best of Bob Dylan in 2005. Like most of Dylan's 21st century output, he produced the song himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost. Composition and recording In their book Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon describe the song as the "first time Dylan wrote...in an authentic rockabilly style, reminiscent of guitarist Brian Setzer". They note that he seems to be making fun of himself in the lyrics, "especially when he sings, 'The girls all say, 'You're a worn-out star'" and that his "excellent vocal" on the studio recording is "tinged with humor and lightness - light years away from the dense atmosphere of Time Out of Mind". They also praise the guitar playing as being "absolutely stunning, particularly "Charlie Sexton's excellent solos" and cite Sexton's riff in the introduction as being "close to Big Joe Turner's "Roll 'em, Pete". The song is performed in the key of E-flat major. Critical reception Like Guesdon and Margotin, critic Greil Marcus also contrasted "Summer Days" with Time Out of Mind, especially with regard to Dylan's vocal performance, in his "Real Life Rock Top 10" column: "Speaking of trying on new clothes—four years ago, Dylan’s celebrated Time Out of Mind mapped a country of abandoned roads and emptied cities, and nothing like what’s happening here could have happened there. 'Waaaal'—in this song, 'Well' is always 'Waaaal', 'Yes' is always 'Yaaaaaaassss', pure minstrel diction, as befits an album seemingly named for Eric Lott’s 1993 study Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class—'Waaaaal, I’m standing on a table, I’m proposing a toast to the King', the singer shouts from inside a roadhouse where a Western Swing band is running a jitterbug beat as if it’s twirling a rope". Spectrum Culture included "Summer Days" on a list of "Bob Dylan's 20 Best Songs of the '00s". In an article accompanying the list, critic Kevin Korber writes that it's "both unfortunate and kind of inevitable that Dylan doesn’t get much credit for having a sense of humor.