This song is brilliant, because there really is this malaise associated with the month of July, isn’t there.  Because you must now confront the fact that the year is not only half over but past half over!  I mean, wasn’t it just New Years?  But no, the summer solstice is past and our souls are not saved; the days have already started to imperceptibly shorten again, with the threat of much shorter soon to come; and even in this the high heat of summer you just know in the back of your mind that the world is already tilting away from the sun again, that your summer vacation cannot last.  Any and all New Years resolutions of yours are not only long forgotten, but laughably so.  

The song even appears exactly midway through Low‘s 2001 critical-high-water-mark Things We Lost In The Fire^[1]I am also quite partial to the version on the Live at Eindhoven EP., so as to emphasize the month’s midway point between the starts of our hopes and of our hopes being blasted by the end of another year.  That is, it’s already getting too late to do all the things you said you’d finally do this year, the time keeps passing too fast.  Suddenly the song’s opening rhymes of “Wait/It’s late/We missed/The date” don’t sound so simplistic anymore.

You even have to listen to the song’s understated opener for years before you realize that Alan and Mimi’s inimitable harmonies, gently rising from major to minor key, actually mimics a rising scream in the softest way possible, like the quiet desperation that Thoreau warned us against.  This is the song for those summer months when the heat becomes oppressive, your body gets lethargic, and the joy of finally getting to sleep in has worn off, because now all those late mornings leave you with less and less daylight to do all the things you intended to do, but still you just keep sleeping in.  “They’ll never wake us in time…” comes the alarmed realization and repetition at the start of each chorus, like an alarm clock perpetually sounding too late.

So of course, what do we do?  With an unquiet anxiety that is unmoved by our promises to improve, we swear that we’ll get to it tomorrow, or next month, or finally get our act together come summer–“maybe we’ll wait till July…” says the song, giving it its title; for this isn’t just a song for the summer slipping away you see, but for all the months leading up to July as well, when we slog through our school years and day jobs and early mornings and harsh winters and myriad other inescapable distractions and responsibilities, even while we subconsciously sense that there are far better ways we could be spending our more-limited-than-we-care-to-admit time on this Earth than the daily minutiae that plagues and binds us; maybe we’ll finally find the time to do it come Summer break, perchance?  When the weather’s nicer, mayhaps?

“Maybe we’ll wait till July” we tell ourselves, but the song is already wiser, for it knows that come July we’ll just say “then August,” and then the song brutally continues down the list of chilling months in a whisper far more menacing than any scream can be, “September,  October, November, oh, December…” like the final hiss of death that the winter solstice represents.  The songs achingly beautiful finale of “la-la-las” is us la-la-la-ing our time away in the inevitable march of procrastination.  The wait till July represents the beginning of the end–of the year, of our lives, both metaphorically and literally…

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Of course, this isn’t some new doctrine: “do not procrastinate the day of your repentance” (Alma 34:34) is a line from some of our most sacred texts—as are “Be wise in the days of your probation” (Mormon 9:28), “As for man, his days are as grass” (Psalms 103:15), and “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14). This has all been but one more gentle reminder, that it’s always the Latter-days for someone, that there is always less time than you think, that (to quote Doris Lessing) whatever you’re going to do, do it now, because the conditions are always impossible.