Summer's Gone: A Somber Set for Three Goodbyes

Greetings and salutations Hivers. Today let’s go into another Three Tune Tuesday post.

As always, thanks to @ablaze for making this series. Lots of people participate in it! Follow the tags to find a ton of good music recommendation.

This week I’m taking a more somber turn. It’s been a rough stretch for fans of a certain era — Ozzy, Hulk Hogan, Chuck Mangione, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who the world knew best as Theo Huxtable, all gone within days of each other. Each one, in his own way, was a larger-than-life figure, part of the background radiation of our pop culture. You didn’t have to be a diehard fan to feel their presence. And now that presence is gone.

So for this week’s Three Tune Tuesday, I’ve picked three songs that echo that sense of ending. Not just mourning, but that quieter ache: the curtain closing, the season turning. These aren’t songs that scream their grief. They are more like gentle signs.

1. “Summer’s Gone” — The Beach Boys (2012)

The final track on the final Beach Boys album, That’s Why God Made the Radio. Brian Wilson has said he wrote this with the band’s farewell in mind, and you can hear it. It’s not the youthful harmony of “Surfin’ Safari” or the complexity of Pet Sounds. This is a slow, tender goodbye.

It’s a song about seasons passing, but also about life and age and endings. For a band whose name is synonymous with summer itself, this is how you bow out, doing so with grace, with melancholy, with one last shimmering sunset.

2. “Into My Arms” — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (1997)

A quietly devastating love song and one of Nick Cave’s most stripped-down and honest recordings. It opens with a nod to disbelief, but from there becomes a gentle wish for someone’s protection and peace. It’s piano and voice, nothing else.

There’s loss here, but also intimacy. The sense that even if someone’s gone, your thoughts follow them, your love lingers. It’s one of those songs that speaks to grief without collapsing under it.

3. “Wish You Were Here” — Pink Floyd (1975)

A classic, yes — but there’s a reason. That acoustic guitar intro already sounds like a memory, and the lyrics are pure elegy. Written for Syd Barrett, it’s become a universal anthem for absence.

Hogan was a prick, and Ozzy had some problmatic issues (see here). Maybe it’s unfair to group poor Chuck and Malcolm in with this group. By all reports, both were wonderful guys. But all were iconic and we are saying goodbye to all of them.