“The Summers We Missed” was the final song we wrote for our first album. I actually intended it to be on our next album but I was so happy with it I needed to share it with the rest of the band. So we played it for the first time in our rehearsal space at Michel’s house and immediately things fell in place and we stuck to the arrangement we came up with literally after only playing this for 15 minutes. The song directed itself into the shape we now know. So we decided then and there this should make it to the first CMON CMON album and started rehearsing it for our recording sessions at Trypoul Studios in The Netherlands. As this was so new, even our producer did not hear it before our recording sessions but once we played it, he too fell for it and we all decided this was indeed a great shoe-tapping powerpop track we should really record for our first album. And so we did.

This song is actually full of personal teenage memories and melancholy. Well, the first Summer featured in this song was the Summer of 1995. The party was real, the backyard and the pool were real and, yeah, so was Julie. It’s a story about two teenagers who were very close but never got romantically involved though both felt they should have back then in that Summer of ‘95. That’s what the first verse of the song is about.

In the second verse, the narrative jumps 20 years forward in time to another Summer where both protagonists accidentally meet again after a random phone call. They both agree that things could have turned out differently but so many things got in the way as they talk about their memories of that Summer they spent twenty years before.

The bridge is a personal reflection where one of the protagonists expresses regret and failure and understands that all it would have taken back then would have been a simple question or a gesture or whatever, but unfortunately, that Summer is gone and it will never come back. Even the second Summer, 20 years later, will not make things better because both are leading different lives and they only share their memories. In the end, both conclude they’ll be fine because at least they have a perfect fantasy of what could have been during that Summer they not only missed, but continue to miss.

In the accompanying music video for “The Summers We Missed” by director Wouter Sel and production companies Wenneker and Volstok, we reflect on the what-if’s of this story. What if the couple did get together? Maybe then things would have gone wrong either way? There’s no guarantee for a sparkling relationship. Not even if you’re both highschool sweethearts. We’re clearly examining the fact that two people can still be estranged and alienated, even when they’re together as lovers. On the other hand, we can’t avoid that big question? Why do we keep burdening ourselves with everything we’re missing out on? Why don’t we all simply follow our hearts and go for it when the moment comes? You never know if you’ll get one more Summer…