Summer People

by

Gretchen Peters

Album: Burnt Toast And Offerings      Released: 2007

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"I've written tons of songs about waitresses," confesses singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters. "I'm very interested in them, for some reason. I don't know why that is. But I've never actually worked as one."

This song's main character is a waitress in a diner on Long Island, and that provided her with a story and a metaphor that Peters found irresistible. She explains, "I had had that idea for the title for a while, because I grew up spending summers on the beaches of Long Island, when I lived in New York. And I was a summer person. I was one of those people that rented a house for the summer or whatever. And I was always really struck by the relationship of the locals with the summer people. Of course, when I was a kid, there were summer romances, and there was this class delineation. But it was also, Hey, we're the people that are always here. We're the ones that are heading in the winter, and the summer people just, they come and they go. And I just thought what a metaphor that would be for inconstancy. It's all metaphor, that song. The whole thing."

"I think I'm going to call it quits. I've had enough of people leaving their messes for me clean up." That line, says Peters, "Was pretty much the crux of the thing right there. I thought it was a great metaphor, because she's a waitress and she's got people walking out on her, on her check, and she's cleaning up people's messes, and it's just such a great metaphor for this person who's sort of stuck in this situation, and just watching people come and go, and feeling like she has no sort of control over her own circumstances."

During the dark days preceding a divorce, a common thread of emotion is the feeling of: You just want to walk away. You don't want to stay here and try to clean this up. You're going to leave it to me to do it. "There are all kinds of levels of that," says Peters, who admits to learning some harsh lessons during the course of events. "Everybody has a story and a side, and there is no 'the way it is.' There's however many people are involved, there are that many points of view. Whether you're the one who is emotionally left or physically left; and those can be two completely different things. You can be married to someone who's physically there, but emotionally not at all, or vice versa. And each thing brings its own set of problems."

There are times when a song will take you unawares. Peters is not immune to this phenomenon. "When I wrote this song, I actually happened to be at the beach. I had had the title for a while, but I finally landed on this sort of hypnotic kind of groove in my head. And I was walking at the beach, and all of the lines started coming so fast, and I had nothing to write on. And I'm out there walking on the beach and thinking, Oh my God, I'm going to have to memorize these lines so that I still have them in my head by the time I get home. So I just kept walking, and more and more lines kept coming, and I kept memorizing. And I walked as fast as I could and got home. And I practically had the whole thing, all the verses written by the time I got back. It all just spilled out." (Thanks to Gretchen Peters for speaking with us about this song. Read her full interview in the Songfacts interviews section. Her website is gretchenpeters.com.)

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