As we’re approaching the summer and the weather is getting warmer, cz by Mk.gee is really starting to resonate with me, especially during these warm starry nights. It’s a song that takes me back to being a college kid working at a sleepaway camp driving some dude’s car I had only met a week prior. All the windows are rolled down as I’m cruising by farmland and forest and the moon is so bright at midnight it’s like the sun hasn’t quite set yet.
“Everything hurts a little more in the summertime.” The chorus of this track speaks to me in those moments where I settle into deep reflection on where I was, who I was becoming, and how my relationships with people were becoming so intense in such a short time. During all the summers where I was single and navigating relationships, it was always a confusing time. These relationships were a product of the environment I was in. At summer camp people sometimes don’t have a good understanding of who the people around them really are during the other 9 months out of the year. But people are around each other all the time, tensions build, and relationships form in this sort of alternate reality that’s on a very short timeline where emotions can be spontaneous and intense.
I interpret the song as Mk.gee speaking to a summer relationship that he knows will change and be something different once the summer is over, something that will ultimately destroy the relationship and the illusions that were created around it in a much more care-free time. “You won’t be here come December, come November.” It shows a great deal of awareness and alludes to an insecurity that his flaws will be revealed over time and might ultimately culminate in destruction of the relationship once the other person recognizes that things will become different.
And because of this self-awareness I believe the chorus is him coming to terms with the idea that the relationship won’t last, but cutting it off in the summertime, in the honeymoon phase, when things are going well would be really hurtful. I find this expression of the summer fling trope and the inevitable question of where things will stand afterwards to be really relatable and compelling as a narrative.
This Friday (May 22, 2020) Mk.gee is going to be releasing another project called A Museum of Contradiction and it will include this song. I had no idea this was coming but I have some pretty high expectations and hopes for this project to be a defining sound for the Summer of 2020.