As soon as the back-to-school stuff hits store shelves, I start thinking about it. It gnaws at me deep within my chest. “The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley is one of those songs that has always mysteriously affected me. Every year, I think it won’t get me, and it always proves me wrong. 

This year, it did a great job of sneaking up on me. I was listening to a classic rock podcast (I know, give me a break), and the hosts were doing a deep dive into the discography of the late Tom Petty. Now, if you know anything about Tom Petty or, I guess, “The Boys of Summer,” then you already know what happened. “The Boys of Summer” came up as a topic on the podcast because Petty’s long-time songwriting partner Mike Campbell wrote the music to it. The story goes that Campbell wrote the track for Petty, who rejected it for not sounding like a Tom Petty song. And honestly, that was a pretty good call on Petty’s part because I don’t think it would have worked as well. The song was offered to Don Henley, who crafted it into the song we all know. 

Now, like all good Lewbowski heads, I hate fucking Eagles, man. Joe Walsh? That’s my guy. Glenn Frey was good, too. But Don Henley? Don Henley has always seemed like an asshole. Anyway, none of that is important. What is important is that  Mike Campbell’s music and a Cadillac on the freeway near San Diego inspired the asshole Henley to put pen to paper. And hoo-boy, did he put that pen to work. The legend goes that Henley was cruising around and saw a Cadillac with a Deadhead sticker, which inspired the lyrics of “The Boys of Summer.” Forty years later, “The Boys of Summer” haunts me.

“The Boys of Summer” is a cornucopia of nostalgia, loss, and introspection. It somehow inspires hope, dread, and terrible sorrow in me. And the neat trick of the song is that the longer I’m alive, the harder it all hits. Before I get into the lyrics Henley put on the page, it’s worth talking about the music, which does some of the song’s heavy lifting. Campbell’s blend of synths and resounding guitar lays the foundation upon which “The Boys of Summer” devastates me. The opening seconds of drums, guitar, and synth always feel like the sonic equivalent of how light reflected off a pool of water dances and shimmers. I don’t want to praise it too highly because, musically, the song is repetitious, but it has a cheery-beach-vibes-gone-bad feel that accentuates the liminal feeling the song puts out. 

The lyrics compare the end of the summer to the end of a chapter in one’s life. Specifically, Henley recalls the end of a relationship, one that can be encapsulated by the joys of summer. There were crazy nights, but now they are over. Instead, nobody’s on the road, nobody’s on the beach. The good times are replaced by isolation and driving by his lover’s home–even though he knows they’re not home. 

Then there’s this:

“I never will forget those nights

I wonder if it was a dream

Remember how you made me crazy?

Remember how I made you scream?

Now I don’t understand what happened to our love”

That’s the crux of the song: the comparison between a season-ending and the end of love, which is a feeling we’re told is eternal and never ends. But all things come to an end, one way or another, just like the inevitability of the coming of a new season. I think there’s a beautiful simplicity in how Henley doesn’t dress up the emotion in “The Boys of Summer.”

“A little voice inside my head said

Don’t look back, you can never look back

I thought I knew what love was, what did I know?

Those days are gone forever

I should just let them go but…”

Then there’s Henley’s use of weirdly specific details–the aforementioned Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, her brown skin shining in the sun, her hair slicked back (with the Wayfarers on, baby)–somehow it all comes together and feels weirdly universal. I have been searching the empty beach town for someone I know is gone. And I’ve been the lover who has vanished forever. 

When the chorus ends with, “I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong, After the boys of summer have gone,” it feels like Henley is knocking down all the dominos he’s been setting up. This final statement is a gut punch. The flashes of the good times, the loneliness of the end of summer…none of it matters. The love was there, and now it is gone while at the same time it endures, probably forever. Henley does throw in some optimism with the line, “But babe, I’m gonna get you back, I’m gonna show you what I’m made of,” but I have always read this as a false hope because the song begins with him driving by her empty house. 

When I was a kid, I always thought the titular boys were a reference to baseball, which, I guess, could work in a way because baseball is a summer game, but that’s not really what the song is about. The boys being invoked are the party dudes who fill up tourist towns and then vanish at the end of the season. Did one of them leave with her? It’s not spelled out. There’s nothing sadder than a tourist town in the off-season, right? The transitory nature of a tourist town’s population the ebb and flow of people throughout the year, align with the theme of people being in our lives one moment and gone forever the next. 

The single was released in October 1984, furthering this notion that the song with summer in the title is more about autumn, the season of death. A month later, the song opened Henley’s solo album, BUILDING A BETTER BEAST. I can’t think of a more apt title for an album containing “The Boys of Summer.” Each year at this time, I brace for it to strike. I’ve tried to listen to the rest of the album, and it’s not very good. The production strays too far into ’80s cheese, and the rest of the songs are sleepy at best. But Henley and Campbell knock it out of the park for four minutes and forty-eight seconds on “The Boys of Summer.” 

Don’t look back, you can never look back.