June is already gone, but with June comes the summer, and with the summer comes the sun, the change of weather. ‘June on the West Coast’ from Bright Eyes’ second album ‘Letting Off the Happiness’, was written by Conor Oberst when he was only 18, and is a song about him drifting along the West coast in search of himself.
It’s a wordy song that definitively focuses on the lyrics, which are sung relatively fast, almost half-sung half-spoken at times, just to give this feeling of escape, to run somewhere else to find himself.
But everywhere he goes, the climate is a mirror of his mood, being uncomfortably too happy in sunny Winnetka, turning on fire ‘with the things I could have told you’ in burning hot Arizona, being heavy and sad in humid and forestry Olympia, hoping for something to happen soon in summer’s birthplace San Diego, and desperately seeking for a ‘tranquil place where the weather won’t get trapped inside my bones’.
It is weather theme song, where this same metaphor is pursued throughout the song, trying to escape to find a home and a true love, but being incapable to find this place where he ‘will plant these seeds and make his home’. This longing for a dream, for a place and love never found, is a common theme among romantics, and Conor is one of them with an identity crisis and a sickness that follows him everywhere.
It is also a very Dylanesque song because of the words and the style, and although Dylan was speaking of the North and the cold whereas Conor evokes here the sun and the heat, there is something about ‘June on the West Coast’ that is reminiscent of ‘Girl from the North Country’ because of all the weather and nature references, the snowflakes, the frozen river, the end of the summer, and the howling winds in Dylan’s song and the sunlight, the summer, the ocean and the beach in Oberst’s song, but also because of the search of the true love in a almost unreal country, a true love that once was for Dylan, a true love that is really needed for Oberst.
‘You see, sorrow gets too heavy and joy it tends to hold you/With the fear that it eventually departs’, the idea that happiness can never be fully appreciated and lived thoroughly because of our incapacity to live the present moment, just reminds me of Louis Aragon’s poem ‘There is no happy love’, sung by many artists: ‘Repeat after me my words and sigh/They have already died in your bright eyes/There is no happy love’
I just love that in the English translation, the association ‘bright eyes’ suddenly appears, so perfect!