The song “Summer Girl (Redux)” by The High Plains Drifters is like a sun-bleached postcard, one you find years later tucked between the pages of a long-forgotten novel, its edges curled and stained with the oily touch of nostalgia. Oh, but how the past shimmers in the heat of memory! The band, ever the itinerant troubadours, has yet again carved a space between the lines of genre—this time dipping their toes into the warm, lapping waves of tropical rock. But don’t be fooled by the sway of steel drums and the lazy, honeyed air that hangs over the tune; this is no simple beach romance. No, it’s the kind of song that lingers like the scent of coconut oil on burnt skin, offering both sweetness and a reminder of the sting.
Larry Studnicky, that sardonic balladeer of love’s wreckage, croons with the voice of a man who has spent too many summers watching passion evaporate like salt on sunbaked skin. His vocals are casual, almost too casual, like a man recounting old wounds over a drink as the ice melts and the sun dips low, casting long, forgiving shadows over what might have been. The melody is playful, even deceptive—so light it threatens to float away—but just beneath it lies the weight of a heart that has been tossed out to sea too many times, only to wash up on shore, battered and bruised, but somehow still beating.
The instrumentation is a curious mix, isn’t it? Steel drums that tickle the air like laughter shared too soon, a rhythm that carries you along with the grace of a tide just before it pulls back. Yet listen closer, and the whole affair starts to feel a bit like a game of tug-of-war with fate. The bright, breezy arrangement skips along, but beneath it, there is a sense of something sinister—something fleeting. The way a summer fling can wrap you in its warmth, only to leave you shivering in the first cold gust of autumn.
The music video, directed by Lars Skaland, takes this undercurrent of melancholy and pulls it up into the light, as though holding up a sea-worn shell for closer inspection. A middle-aged man, whose face is etched with the lines of failed loves, drifts through a series of memories—each woman a season, a chapter, a scar. The femme fatale who first shattered his heart, the ex-wife who took more than just his money—these are ghosts that dance through his past, their laughter still echoing faintly in the hollow spaces he tries, in vain, to fill.
And yet, like all things touched by the sea, there is a glimmer of hope. Our protagonist—our sunburnt, wind-chapped, ever-hopeful fool—seems, in the end, to find something more than regret. Perhaps he is broken, yes, but there is still a softness to his smile, a willingness to throw his heart back into the ocean, knowing full well it might never return. The sun sets, the steel drums fade, but love—love, he seems to say, is always worth the risk. And maybe that is the real deception of “Summer Girl (Redux)”: it seduces you with promises of carefree romance, only to leave you wondering if you’ll ever recover from the ones you let slip away.
Troy Johnstone