Summer Music Memories

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Clockwise from upper left: Cat Stevens, cover for Violent Femmes, cover for Maggot Brain, cover for Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.

Courtesy of the artists

Clockwise from upper left: Cat Stevens, cover for Violent Femmes, cover for Maggot Brain, cover for Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.

Courtesy of the artists

All Songs Considered Blog

Share Your Summer Music Memories

To a certain extent, we all share the same music every summer. Once the three or four hottest club bangers of the season find their way into rotation, they're all but inescapable — blasting from every trunk speaker and boom box, popping up in every TV commercial and movie trailer. But there are also songs and albums that, regardless of when they were released, become forever linked in our minds with a particular summer and the people with whom we spent them.

On this week's episode of All Songs Considered, Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton share the songs that made their summers in Queens and Kansas, respectively — and listeners chime in with their own memories. Included are American classics from Bob Dylan and Neil Young, some virtuosic noodling from Funkadelic and Rush, and the inevitable, all-time jam that is Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun."