“Summer Never Felt This Sad” by Big Words is something to behold. This song is five minutes and fifty seconds of pure, emotive brilliance. The slow, acoustic guitar, warm piano, and ambient background vocals appear in a heartbreaking mode, each chord infusing the emotional fabric with despondency and angst. It’s rare to find a song that really draws you out of your everyday life and into its own universe like this. It’s immersive. It’s cathartic. At the end of the day, it’s one of the most effective pieces of music you’ll ever hear.
The intro motif consists of an ever-strumming acoustic and an elegant piano riff. Drums casually carry the beat forward, and eventually, into our first verse: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to see in your eyes / I find it hard to speak when I’m in disguise.” The singer’s voice is deeply warm and drowned in genuine heartache. You can so easily relate to the words not necessarily because of their meaning (although they’re quite poetic), but because of the intimacy of the performance. The intro motif returns on the occasion, cutting the words into brief stanzas. Roughly halfway through, however, the words disappear completely and we’re left with the drone of a dismal, two-chord progression—and although this sounds like it’d get old—it never does. The changes in texture vivify the repeated harmony. Plus, the duration of this outro furthers the lethargically melancholy ambiance in an artistic way. You’re left affected in a way you didn’t expect to be. Big Words truly crafted something magical with this one.
Written by Alyce Lindberg
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