The usual remit of this Project is to take words — somebody else’s words, words that were intended as literary poetry — and to combine them with original music in some way. Every so often, I’ll use my own poetry, but the journey there is similar, not like most songwriting where the songwriter will as likely as not begin with a tune, or a set of words that seem to emerge with a tune.

But I have written that way. No one can spend as much time with music as I do without having the music muse show up dancing with the lyric muse sometimes. Today’s piece is an older composition, one that I considered posting for the Parlando Project since its beginning years ago. You haven’t seen it before today because of that difference, because it always was a song.

I recall distinctly how this song began. I was reading an interview with Brandon Flowers, the lead singer of the modern rock band The Killers. In it he wanted to make plain that for all the traveling showmanship and flash of that part of his life, he was a guy who grew up in a small town where one could see a farm tractor driving down a main street as an unremarkable occurrence.

Bang!

As I read that I thought of the small mid-century Iowa town I grew up in. A tractor on main street? Yes, that had never registered as unusual until this other person made a point to remember that. A version of this song came quickly from that moment of coincident remembrance. Taken back to my mid-century small town in my mind, I could see this teenage schoolkid who had a springtime crush on a fellow classmate, but who couldn’t get up the nerve or words to speak to her of his feelings. And then it would be summer vacation. In my town, my school, in my time, most of the kids lived in the surrounding countryside and disappeared from the town outside of the school-year.

And eventually, as I saw this kid in my mind, this time of year, late August, would arrive. He’d have another chance to speak to her. Would he have the courage? He knows half-way at least that he might not. Does he? We never find out.

Another AI generated image. I couldn’t get the AI genie to generate one of the tall, narrow farm tractors I remembered from my youth, so I had to settle for this.

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A version of the words came out fairly quickly as I inhabited that kid’s mind and the tune was nearly there simultaneously. The somewhat odd phrase that became the refrain and title was there from the beginning. I don’t know why that phrase came to me. Researching, I see there was a 1961 Rock Hudson movie with the title Come September.   Not a small-town setting, more the Italian Riviera. Our little town did have a movie theater then, or that film might have played on our black & white TV as a “movie of the week.”  Bobby Darin was also in the film and wrote music for it, including a title-tune “Come September.”*  That title laying fallow in my unconscious is plausible — but whatever, I like my variation, as the overlap from late August to September seems a distinct “month” on my calendar, and perhaps yours.

Maybe I should have performed this with a full rock-band setting in honor of The Killers, but my mood and logistics brought this voice and acoustic guitar version out instead. You can hear it with the graphic audio player below if you see that. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I checked this morning, it was an instrumental.