“Hot Scary Summer”: A Meditation on Art, Climate, and Human Nature
Music Monday 6: Reflections on humanity’s final season
As I wrote When The Trees All Burned, “Hot Scary Summer” by Villagers (written by Conor O’Brien) became more than just a song on my writing playlist — it evolved into a prophecy. The book unfolds through humanity’s final summer, ending dramatically on Labour Day, and O'Brien’s lyrics feel like they could have been written for my characters as they navigate their last precious months.
As O’Brien sings “We’ve always been up against it/But now it’s sad to see/We’re up against each other,” I find myself wondering: isn’t this the fundamental tragedy of climate change? We’ve created a crisis that demands unprecedented unity, yet it seems to drive us further apart. In my novel, that last summer becomes a pressure cooker of human nature — some characters band together while others turn on each other, all while the heat rises toward Labour Day.
What strikes me most is how both the song and my novel grapple with the concept of preventable catastrophe. When O’Brien repeats “this shouldn’t be hard work,” I hear the voice of every climate scientist who’s tried to warn us, every activist who’s pushed for change, every character in my book who asks: how did we get here? The tragedy isn’t just that we’re facing extinction — it’s that we chose this path through a thousand small decisions, each one seemingly insignificant until they accumulate into something monstrous. And while When The Trees All Burned isn’t exclusively about climate change, it does play a significant role in predicting the end of the world as we know it.
O’Brien’s imagery of “kissing on the cobblestones in the heat of the night” captures those fleeting moments of beauty in my characters’ final summer — the last sweet moments in the park, the final music festivals, the desperate grasping at normalcy even as September looms. His lyrics take on deeper meaning when considering what love and identity mean on the brink of extinction. In both the song and my novel, characters face an uncertain future where survival might mean compromise, where the pressure to perpetuate humanity could threaten hard-won freedoms. As the calendar counts down to Labour Day, these questions linger: In a world focused solely on survival, will there be room for love in all its forms? Will the new society preserve the rights and dignity of all its members, or will biological imperatives overshadow personal identity? Perhaps these tensions will drive humanity’s next chapter. (You’ll have to come back for book 2 in the series to find out!)
The song’s final refrain “I live inside you/And you live in me” speaks to what I believe is the heart of both works: the inescapable interconnectedness of human existence. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we’re bound together in this crisis. That last summer forces my characters to face this truth — that we rise or fall as one species.
Maybe that’s why this song resonates so deeply with my work — because both pieces aren’t just about climate change or the end of the world. They’re about how we spend our summers when we know they’re numbered, about the choices we make when we can no longer pretend the heat isn’t rising. Sometimes it takes the end of everything to show us what matters most.
