By Gavin Kentch
Summer à la nordic skiers: a time for volume weeks, for easy distance, for watch tans and stinky rollerski boots, for planning a route that goes past a cool body of water.
There is one soundtrack for all of this activity, featuring the percussive click of ferrules on pavement and the gentle patter of feet on trails. Plus, in much of the country, crickets or cicadas or whatever they do for bugs Outside. But there is another, more literal soundtrack here as well: the songs that athletes listen to while they accrue all those hours.
The Atlantic postulates that the cultural institution of the song of the summer is a “myth,” more “a shared hallucination than a hard-and-fast label.” Slate, meanwhile, argues that the concept is alive and well, that the song of the summer for 2024 is, obvsly, “Espresso” (at least as of early June; I feel like I haven’t heard it as much in the last month), and that Sabrina Carpenter’s “irresistible song about irresistibility” owes a strong debt to an early-1980s electro/boogie/post-disco sound that was previously overlooked and undervalued. Billboard, finally, has a “Songs of the Summer” chart, which is both mathematically unassailable — it literally tallies the most-played songs between Memorial Day and Labor Day — and yet somehow unsatisfying when it comes to capturing the sheer zeitgeist of the thing, at least to my ears.
I could make a complicated argument on the final point about cultural poetics or some such, but bottom line, no one sings along to “I Had Some Help” in the car, while everyone does to “Good Luck, Babe!” (or at least wants to), and so the song of the summer simply cannot be Post Malone’s (ft. Morgan Wallen) extended meditation on the vagaries of alcohol use in human relationships. I don’t make the rules.
But you didn’t come here for a geriatric millennial’s taste in music (I align here with not only fellow Masters athletes Jessie and Rosie but also with Gen Z Novie, fwiw, but also I listen to music on my car radio instead of via a streaming service so what do I know about culture anyway). Rather, I simply asked most members of the national team what their personal song of the summer was, however they defined the concept.
Results are below. I started out trying to loosely order them in descending order of what a song of the summer has traditionally sounded like (“upbeat and easy to sing or dance to,” “often come out a couple months before summer begins,” etc., in one analysis), but once you get into, like, country (Will Koch) or French indie pop (Haley Brewster) you’ve pretty well outpaced the bounds of my taxonomy.
And that’s even before you broach the musical tastes of friend-of-the-national-team Maja Dahlqvist, or longtime partner Kevin Bolger (Hooja, anyone? Benjamin Ingrosso? This is so not part of the regular rotation of Anchorage contemporary hit stations MIX 103.1 or KGOT 101.3). Their contributions are superb, and led me down quite a rabbit hole, but this is also some distance from the Billboard Hot 100.
Anyway. Do you want to know what the members of the U.S. national team have on repeat these days? From Alaska to Vermont, from age 18 to 35, here’s what’s getting them through summer training.
Update: Here is a Spotify playlist if you are so inclined.
Jessie Diggins: Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
Novie McCabe: Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!” (“an insanely good one”)
Jack Young: Sophie Ellis-Bextor, “Murder on the Dancefloor”
Rosie Brennan: Hozier, “Too Sweet” (“I guess I’m just a sucker for moody music”)
Sophia Laukli: Jack Johnson, “Banana Pancakes”
Zanden McMullen: Jack Johnson and Stick Figure, “Home”
Jack Lange: Avicii, “Silhouettes”
Will Koch: Blake Shelton, “God’s Country” [*but see footnote]
Haley Brewster: Layup, “Together” (“Mostly because it has been making frequent appearances and I am roommates with my best friend this summer and have gotten to see a lot of my good friends!”)
Ben Ogden: Saints & Liars, “Garden Song”
Kevin Bolger: Hooja and Miriam Bryant, “VEM FAN E DU?” (“The song that has been on a lot all spring and summer … just a catchy tune haha and I’ve been into it!”)
Maja Dahlqvist (friend-of-the-national-team honorable mention here): Benjamin Ingrosso, “Look Who’s Laughing Now”
Michael Earnhart: Chicago, “If You Leave Me Now”
Kevin Bolger: The Eagles, “Hotel California” (“whenever I’m on a long run or ski, this song just puts me in a flow state haha and it’s fantastic!”)
John Steel Hagenbuch: Steve Miller Band, “Dance, Dance, Dance”; Tom Petty, “Yer So Bad”; Bob Dylan, “Girl from the North Country”; Van Morrison, “Wild Night”
Murphy Kimball: explicit: Future, Metro Boomin, and Travis Scott, “Cinderella”; Don Toliver, “NEW DROP”
clean: Dominic Fike, “3 Nights”; Tame Impala, “The Moment”
* re: Will Koch’s choice: It is technically possible that this was in fact a reference to “GOD’S COUNTRY,” above, by rapper and producer Travis Scott (aka Travis $cott), rather than to “God’s Country,” by country star and wide-ranging media personality Blake Shelton. However, Koch’s stated rationale for choosing this song was, in full, “’cause it’s a banger,” and, say what you will about the generally discordant soundscape of Scott’s œuvre, as between this and swelling chords of country twang I really don’t think that anyone would describe Scott’s work as the “banger” here. Hence God’s Country à la Mr. Gwen Stefani it is.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
