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WOLFSONG
Summer of ‘67
What beautiful memories
I was eighteen this summer, the famed Summer of Love. I did a lot of hitchhiking in those days — it was relatively safe then, and drivers were not so weary about picking up strangers and offering them a ride.
The song has a very specific and clear seed. Strangely, the seed formed in the spring of 1969. I was on my way home to Stockholm after a visit to Halsingborg, a small southern Swedish town just across the sound from Denmark.
It must have been March or April, and a cold one at that. I’m standing in the middle of a large southern plain and the winds are remorseless. Rain in the air, or at least the threat of it. I hug my jacket closer to me and wish that I had had a cap of some sort, my ears were icing up — well, that’s how it felt. And the cars, this particular day, utterly without sympathy and without any trace of slowing down. I was on my own, in the middle of relatively nowhere, freezing to death (not literally, of course).
This was the image, this standing in the middle of fields and fields and fields suspended between point A and point B, waiting for a ride. This was the image that grew into song, and a song quite different from the initial impression.
The song moved two years back, to 1967, added a friend, and a romance, and a…
