“I was excited, obviously,” said Aubriana Stover of Jurupa Valley of the announcement several weeks ago that all seven members of BTS have now finished their mandatory South Korean military service, which took members of the group out of circulation from December 2022 to June 2025, and are planning a reunion for early 2026.

She’d just met Jazmine Adams and Zaidee Sanchez, best friends from San Diego, and in the way members of the BTS fandom known as Army often do, they had already bonded over their love for the band.

“I felt like I was becoming a fan all over again,” Adams said of the news. “Just the excitement and knowing that there was going to be a community coming back together again.”

Were there tears and overwhelming joy at the news of BTS’s return? Oh yeah, Sanchez and the others said.

“Think of Michael Jackson at his prime – that times 10,” Stover said.

“Or how everyone was passing out (at Jackson shows then),” Adams said. “That’s the feeling I got.”

Valeria Altamirano of Tucson joined the group of young women. She and Sanchez met through online BTS fandom and met in real life on Thursday for Jin’s first of two shows at Honda Center.

“I’d say it felt like I was 12 years old again,” Altamirano said. “Like I was just a little kid, discovering them all over again.”

We lost track of our new BTS pals as showtime neared, but it’s the safest of bets to say their delight continued throughout the hour and 55 minutes of Jin’s performance, the third solo tour after Suga in 2023 and J-Hope earlier this year.

The #RunSeokJin_Ep.Tour takes its name from Jin’s full name, Kim Seok-jin, and “Run Jin,” the web variety series that Jin debuted a year ago after concluding his military service. Over 36 episodes, Jin and friends played games, did challenges, and had as much fun as possible. The tour seeks to recreate much of that playful attitude.

“Running Wild” kicked off the show with Jin dressed in a sparkling denim-colored jacket and pants by Gucci, for which he is a global brand ambassador, singing the soaring pop anthem as he skipped and danced through confetti and blasts of pyrotechnics.

“I’ll Be There” followed as the packed arena glowed with the synchronized flashing lights of “bombs,” the name given to the orb-like light sticks fans bring to BTS-affiliated shows.

Most of the songs featured a mix of Korean and English lyrics, though the tilt toward English now seems slightly more than it was on earlier BTS records. Musically, Jin’s solo records, including the EP “Echo,” released in May, and the EP “Happy,” released in November, shift from pop ballads to synth-pop, dance rock to rock anthems.

After “Falling,” a romantic ballad, a close-up of Jin’s face filled the video screens on stage as he slowly raised his fingers to his full lips and blew the crowd a kiss, eliciting screams so loud the decibel-checking app on my Apple Watch handed in its resignation.

Telepathy Game, the first of several audience-participation challenges, featured Jin trying to guess a secret word or phrase acted out by audience members, with the number of correct answers determining what outfit he’d change into for his next song. The word “happy” was easy enough – broad smiles, hands angled upwards around beaming faces.

Somehow, he also guessed “flying chair,” a reference to a stunt in an episode of “Run Jin,” though the fan in the floor seats who waved their chair overhead might have been what did it.

“Super Tuna” followed with Jin in a broad straw hat and what looked like rubber boots – a fisherman’s outfit, perhaps? – as fans sang and danced wildly to the upbeat dance pop song, which, judging by the number of fish-themed T-shirts, hats and accessories in the crowd, is a fan favorite.

After spinning a wheel to pick a song for the audience to sing, which Jin rigged to give them “Anpanman” based on their cheers, he ducked off stage to change as the sing-along unfolded.

He returned to the stage in a slim black suit with silver buttons on the seams of his pants, sitting alone at a piano to accompany himself solo first on “I Will Come to You,” which ended with a lovely falsetto run, and next “Abyss,” which started solo before the band joined in halfway through.

In addition to the light-changing bombs that most in the crowd waved throughout the night, the crowd also, well, barked at him often between songs. Apparently, this has become a tradition for K-pop fans of certain acts.

After the big rock anthem “Another Level,” which saw guitarist Park Shin-won step out to solo as Jin sang, he led the audience in the Sing-Along Game, which gave 30 seconds to guess the song that fans were singing from lyrics unseen by him on the screen or get bonked on the head by silver tray suspended over him. (It’s another bit from the “Run Jin” series.)

“Don’t Say You Love Me,” which he’d sung on stage earlier in the show, was easy. “No More Dream,” which drew laughter from the crowd when the lyrics on screen shifted to Korean and suddenly a whole lot of mumbling ensued, he missed. Bonk!

The latter run of the show included mostly high-energy numbers such as “Loser,” a terrific number off “Echo,” the seven-song EP he released in May, and whose seven tracks all showed up in the set. “Rope It,” a country dance number, saw Jin in cowboy garb doing a bit of boot-scooting shimmies down the ramp out from the stage.

BTS songs showed up here as well, with a medley that opened with “Dynamite” and “Butter,” a pair of that band’s best bangers, and ended with “Mikrokosmos” and “Spring Day.”

“The Astronaut” ended with Jin on his back amid the confetti streamers that blasted off midway through the number before “Nothing Without You” closed out the main set with Jin sinking through a stage trapdoor.

Two more BTS numbers, “Epiphany” and “Moon,” opened the encore, with Jin going down to the floor to get fans to sing the wordless melody that’s featured in “Moon.”

Then with “To Me, Today,” a peppy number with a crowd chant at points in the chorus, he wrapped up the night, and with it, edged one step closer to the return of BTS in spring 2025.

Coachella perhaps? They’ve never played it, though their K-pop peers Blackpink have. Or a new stadium tour like their last tour, which played multiple nights at SoFi Stadium.

One way or another, it is coming.

One is empathy for Tamra’s target du jour, which on Thursday, July 17, is once again Katie Ginella. The other? Admiration, because honestly, the housewives are done for when Terrible Tamra pulls the pin.

We’ll get to Poor Katie in a moment, but first, welcome back former housewife Gretchen Rossi, who makes her return on Thursday as a friend of the housewives this season.

Well, friend of all except Tamra. Gretchen seems likely to be a powerful adversary to her for one simple reason: neither woman can stand the other.

These two go way back – Tamra joined the show for its third season, Gretchen for its fourth – and a dozen years after Gretchen left the cast there’s no love lost between the two, as is clear when Heather Dubrow brings up Gretchen during a champagne-and-onion-rings party on Tamra’s bed. Housewives, they’re just like us!

“Oh, God,” Tamra groans after Heather tells her she’s hung out with Gretchen recently. “Does she have a nose?”

Heather replies that yes, Gretchen in fact has a nose.

“Because the pictures on Instagram, it’s all blurred,” Tamra explains, referring, it seems, to some possibly filtered social media pics that flash on the screen.

Gretchen gets her first confessional after that and uses it partly to rebut Tamra.

“It’s been 11 years since I’ve been sitting in this chair, and I would say I look like I’ve been frozen in time,” Gretchen says as the show does a video-morph effect on her face over time to back that assertion.

“And no plastic surgery, not on even on these suckers,” she adds, giving her chest a little shake to prove her point.

Turns out, Gretchen and Katie, who only joined the show the previous season, already are friendly.

“Every new housewife always reaches out to me and asks how to deal with Tamra,” Gretchen explains. ‘And I literally tell them to run. I could be making so much money if I started charging them for advice.”

Gretchen’s also friendly with Jenn Pedranti, who invites her and Katie and their spouses over to dinner. Let’s pause here to honor Gretchen’s longtime partner – 16 years, during which he took fire from Tamra, too – as possessor of perhaps the most perfect name ever for a housewife’s man: Slade Smiley.

“The irony of so many of these women claiming it’s a fake relationship is that most of these women have gotten divorced since then,” Gretchen says of her relationship with Slade. A montage of her past housewife foes Tamra, former housewife Vicki Gunvalson, and Shannon Storms Beador – and their divorce dates in 2011, 2013, and 2018, respectively – scroll by as she speaks.

“Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?” she declares as the video clips shift to archival footage of Tamra calling Gretchen a gold digger and Slade a piece of you know what, among other things.

After the season premiere a week earlier, which featured Katie on the receiving end of accusations about violating various unwritten rules of housewifery, Katie had invited everyone to lunch at Nice To Meet You Hot Pot in Irvine. She’s hoping to clear the air, rinse the dirty laundry, reboot the modem and get her friendships back on track.

Alas, Katie, she knew not what Tamra had already unleashed upon her during an earlier conversation with Gina Kirschenheiter and Emily Simpson.

“Katie’s like a silent assassin,” Tamra says. “Like she’s really sweet and nice to your face and then she’s doing all this stuff behind your back.”

A week earlier, Tamra tore into Katie for allegedly contacting a blogger who’d posted something negative about Tamra online. Emily had also blasted her for allegedly dragging Emily’s children inappropriately into the spotlight. Only Jenn and Shannon had defended her during the premiere.

Now Tamra accidently on purpose lets slip to Gina and Emily that during the previous season Katie had videotaped Shannon having a meltdown and later showed it to Alexis Bellino, Shannon’s biggest enemy in that season.

Gina gasps. “She showed it to Alexis?” she says in a whisper for some reason. “They were in an active lawsuit [at the time]”

Flash-forward to the restaurant where Katie is about to go from last week’s frying pan into this week’s hot pot. Gina has decided she simply must confront her over the Shannon Tape and thereby ensure that Katie has one less friend and defender.

It’s hard to trust you, Gina says, and turns to Shannon before continuing.

“Tamra just told me that last year she recorded you [freaking out] and then sent the video to Alexis,” she says as Shannon’s head whips around and Tamra pulls off a tricky wince-eyeroll combo move.

Katie insists there was no video, just a voice memo that she sent to her husband Matt because she was annoyed by Shannon’s noisy outbursts.

“I did some [bleeped-up bleep] and regret doing it,” Katie tells Gina, and suddenly they’re pledging to try to be friends again.

Shannon takes off early, and into that void come Tamra and Gretchen, battling like no time elapsed since their last on-camera spat. In Gretchen, Tamra faces someone who knows her and their shared history and doesn’t back down.

“You always blame it on somebody else,” Gretchen tells her at one point. “So you can spin your little lies and do all your manipulation like you do. You are the liar beyond liars.”

Elsewhere in this week’s episode:

— Emily, a week after tucking unwrapped donuts into the pocket of her coat, does a bit more foraging in the hot pot spot.

“I got a hard-boiled egg for the ride home,” she announces as the luncheon wraps up.

“Shut up and let me see it!” Heather replies. “Did you put an egg in your purse?”

The show flashes back 15 minutes to see that Emily did indeed take an egg from the hot pot buffet, and using tongs, place it in her handbag.

She takes it out of her purse to show the others, and then exclaims, “Oh! I thought it was hard-boiled!”

Emily, God bless her, had put a now-cracked-and-oozing uncooked egg in her purse, which leaves the other housewives in tears, and one of them, probably Gina, snorting with laughter.

— Shannon tells Katie about her recent medi-spa treatments, which included a facial, lasers, and Botox.

“It’s just neck up,” she explains later in a confessional. “There’s no neck down until I’m in a relationship. I don’t even know when the last time was I had a bikini wax.”

Surely Chekov’s bikini line will be waxed before the season’s finale curtain.

— Shannon has been kissing the fellas here and there, though, having smooched four gents without having to initiate the lip-locks once, she says after a conversation with her daughter Sophie about her new embrace of singlehood.

“I’m not a kissing bandit,” Shannon explains. “But I do like a kiss, if it’s good.”

— Tamra also takes some shots at Jenn during her boudoir champagne and onion rings get-together with Heather, claiming that Jenn, after first meeting Tamra, tried to become her, buying a house nearby and reshaping her body through exercise and styling.

“She went to the hair salon where I went and had my old hair extensions put in her head,” Tamra says, which we’re pretty sure is not how it works, right?

What, you forgot that our favorite undomesticated goddesses are back for their 19th season of cocktails, crying, conversation and caterwauling? For shame!

Fear not, though, for we are here to recap your favorite franchise’s flagship show. This is where it all started, people, Orange County, baby, and don’t let those other housewives of New York City, Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills, Miami, the Potomac, Salt Lake City – take a deep breath – and soon, Rhode Island, fool you.

Katie survived her first season a year ago, though barely. She outraged Heather DuBrow by sharing rumors that Heather had called the paparazzi on herself to generate positive publicity for herself and her husband, Terry DuBrow.

She ticked off Emily Simpson by telling other housewives that her daughter, while babysitting for Emily’s kids, heard mommy expressing negative opinions about Heather, thereby landing on Heather’s naughty list, and trust us, you do not want to be there.

She also had a busy break between seasons, allegedly connecting Emily’s former nanny to a blogger to spill the beans about what Emily’s kids said about Emily’s comments on Heather. Subsequently, when Tamra Judge was accused by a different online site of being behind several online troll accounts, prompting Tamra to threaten a lawsuit, Katie supposedly called this second blogger to console her.

Katie starts the season in the belief that Shannon Storms Beador is in her corner because she stood up for her when Katie was attacked during last year’s reunion shows. [In an interview, Shannon says that’s not how she sees things.]

After the traditional premiere episode montage of Real Housewives Doing Things – They’re at Dog Beach! They’re roller skating! They’re doing face masks with their boyfriends! – Katie and Shannon go out for car shopping and chit-chat about Katie’s recent trip to a big golf tournament in Arizona.

“A lot of single men?” Shannon asks her.

“Oh my God, it was a sea of (bleep),” Katie replies.

Meanwhile, Gina Kirschenheiter has let boyfriend Travis out of the doghouse and back into the house. A season ago, they separated their living arrangements while lingering issues with Travis’s divorce got settled. It’s unclear if that actually happened, but that’s OK because apparently the wind in Bali told Gina it was.

“I so connected with the wind there, and there were so many signs,” she says in a confessional, and just like that, Travis and Gina and their six combined kids are moving into a new 2,800-square-foot house together.

Gina, who is Emily’s ride-or-die, spends much of the episode dragging Katie’s name through the mud on Emily’s behalf, reporting back what she’d heard from housewife Jenn Pedranti at Dog Beach.

“So this (nanny) is basically like, ‘Hi, Katie, I want to ruin Emily’s life and I want to (bleep)-talk her her kids,’ and ‘Katie’s like, ‘Oh, here’s the phone number (for a Housewives blogger) to go do it,’” Gina says with absolute conviction that that’s exactly how the deal went down.

Emily, of course, takes it all as the gospel truth and gets even madder.

“Saying those things about me being a terrible mother was (bleeping) not OK,” Katie noted in her confessional. “And I still haven’t got an apology from her.”

Elsewhere on this week’s episode:

— Tamra is in therapy, just as she promised she was going to be on the reunion shows. How do we know? Because she brought a camera crew to therapy so “Real Housewives” wouldn’t miss out on her tearful session!

Tamra talks about what she wants to achieve in therapy, listing things such as not being so explosive, impulsive, responsive and harsh with her words. This gives the showrunners the opportunity to assemble a montage of Tamra failing at each of those things in the past. Is that classy? Of course not, but hey, any excuse to reuse that iconic clip of Tamra screaming “That’s my opinion!” at the top of her lungs.

To Tamra’s credit, she seems sincere about getting to the root of her issues. She’s also wondering if she’s on the autism spectrum, which her therapist agrees is possible, though announcing that on a podcast a few months ago was definitely jumping the gun, which Tamra realized after she was immediately “annihilated” online for saying so without having received a proper diagnosis.

— Heather didn’t get much screen time. Turns out that $16 million Beverly Hills mansion was already millions over budget for its renovation when asbestos was found throughout it. Husband Terry suggests they just sell it as is and cut their losses. Heather insists they should at least reinstall flooring so it looks nice, arguing that even if the new buyers tear out the new flooring, it’s only $45,000 to make the place look nicer until it sells.

You spend that much on a party at Nobu, Terry jokes, and the sad thing is he’s not wrong.

— Emily doesn’t want Katie or any of the housewives talking about her kids, but she’s spilling those beans all over the place as she talks about one of her kids.

— Jenn and boyfriend Ryan are still engaged despite all the criticism that Tamra and others fired at Ryan in the previous season. We meet them in a high-end swimwear shop where Ryan is trying to convince Jenn that they should get married on the beach in swim shorts and a bikini.

She comes out of the dressing room to model what that might look like, complete with a veil and bouquet, and if this were a cartoon, Ryan’s eyes would have bulged out of his head as his tongue unspooled across the floor.

“Babe, you are (bleepin’) hot!” he says as he picks her up and carries her back into the dressing room.

“We’re not having sex in the dressing room because that would be gross,” Jenn warns him.

— Gina and Katie plan to meet at a coffee shop to talk over the Emily situation. Gina brings Emily, which Katie rightly considers an ambush. Shouting ensues and the coffee date ends abruptly.

That surprised her, Beador says, though she’s happy with what did make her list.

“Not only this season, but more importantly for myself for the year, it’s just that so much of my life has been focused on relationships,” she says on a phone call the day before the 19th season of the “Real Housewives of Orange County” premiered. “I kind of set my personal goals in line with whatever’s going on with my relationships at the time.

“You know, I have some good, fun ideas of things that I could maybe branch out and do on my own,” Beador continues. “I know that’s maybe a Housewives cliché, going, ‘Oh, big news coming!’ But this is my 11th season, so it’s not something that I’m just coming up with at the top of my head. It’s things that I’ve thought about for years.”

• RELATED: Map of every OC restaurant featured in ‘Real Housewives of Orange County’ season 18

In the premiere, we learned that Beador spent a week at the Golden Door Spa in San Marcos to rebalance her life and find a healthier path forward.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to focus on continuing to lead the healthiest life that I could live,’” she says. “And trying to maybe look into different things I can do with my time.

“I exercise with a trainer again, because I did gain weight,” Beador says. “It’s slowly coming off, but I’m older, and it’s just harder. I want to focus on that.”

And the single life, she adds, hasn’t been at all what she feared it might be.

“I never thought that I would be OK being by myself,” Beador says. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, you’re going to love it.’ But I forced myself to be single after my DUI, and you know I kind of enjoy it because I get to create my own schedule and make my own plans without checking with anyone.

“I spend a lot of time with my daughters, visiting them, and traveling,” she says. “I will still want the partner, but if live the rest of my life living the way that I am, I’ll be OK.”

In the previous season, Beador had perhaps her hardest go-round ever. It began in the aftermath of a highly publicized arrest for driving under the influence. It continued with bitter drama from different angles.

Former housewife Alexis Bellino returned as a friend of the housewives – and as the new girlfriend of Beador’s ex John Jansson, who filed a lawsuit against Beador for money he claimed she owed him. [In the premiere of the new season, we learn that Beador has since settled the lawsuit for $60,000.]

And longtime friend Tamra Judge argued with Beador, telling her she should not be drinking at all after the DUI, though other issues crept in, too.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Beador talked about her season from hell, her relationship with Tamra, the proper way for housewives’ children to be portrayed on the show, and the only guy in her life who has never let her down.

Q: Your last season was brutal. How’d you go about resetting and getting back on a better path?

A: I went to the Golden Door, which is one of the things in the first episode. But it was difficult, and in the end, I was very depressed because I did feel a little beaten up. But again, I put myself in that position. There’s nobody to blame but me. I’m the one that got the DUI. I’m the one that dated John Janssen for as long as I did. I put myself in a position for all those things to happen.

I will be honest. When I started the [previous] season with basically zero friends, I didn’t know that I’d be able to get through it. So there’s a part of me that feels strength after getting through it. Like, OK, you survived. It was really hard, but you survived.

So that makes me feel like I’m stronger. If you look on the bright side, you say it can never be as – I don’t think it can be as bad as – bad as that.

Q: Having been through it, were you anxious as filming for this new season began?

A: No, not at all. My favorite season of filming was season 14. That was the year that I was single [post-divorce], and I was silly. I was having fun and kissing a bunch of men, and it was really fun.

As season 18 ended, I ended in a good place with most people. So for the first time in a while, it was like I’m going to be excited to come back and be with these ladies. And you will see –  I hope they show it all – a very silly side of me. Like it got to the end where I would just walk into a room and people would just start laughing. because I was a little bit over the top. I wanted to have fun and be silly.

Q: One of the other big dramas last season was the warfare between you and Tamra. Have you guys worked things out?

A: We did hug at the reunion because at that particular moment, that was an appropriate thing to do. Just because I hug someone doesn’t mean that everything is OK. As much as I might sound cruel, I’ve had a lot of self-reflection in the last couple of years. And I believe that our friendship was toxic. I felt I was walking on eggshells, and it wasn’t necessarily healthy for me. So it was important to me to get to place where we can at least coexist.

Because last year, the girls all said, “Gosh, when you and Alexis and you and Tamra are in a room, we just feel the tension, and it just ruins everything.” I don’t want to have that happen again. Do I sound cruel that I don’t want to rush back into a friendship? I don’t, because in my eyes I see that it wasn’t healthy, and what I’m trying to do is choose the healthiest path that I can.

Q: I want to ask you about some of the other cast members. Katie Ginella says in the premiere that you and she got closer after last season.

A: Hearing her words, I was a little shocked. What was she talking about? In moments like at the reunion, I felt that everyone was coming at her, it was being pushed too far. A bit unfair. But I hadn’t been that close to it.

Q: It looks like this new season Katie is still under fire for the things she says to and about the other housewives.

A: I wish I could explain Katie’s mind, but I think it’s unexplainable. And as you continue to watch the season, I have my own issues [with Katie].

Q: There’s also the Jenn and Ryan storyline, where now they’re talking about Jenn wearing a wedding bikini instead of a wedding dress.

A: We all wish we could have that body, my friend.

Q: Ryan’s definitely got better abs than I do. Tamra was mad that Jenn was with Ryan. Where did you come down on their relationship?

A: From the moment Jenn [Pedranti] started three years ago, I was on her side. Tamra was coming at her with, “Ryan said this. He wanted to [bleep] me. He’s been with another girl.” Every time we filmed, she had some new tidbit that was very hurtful to their relationship. I was on Jenn’s side the whole time.

Q: Former housewife Gretchen Rossi is the new friend of the housewives this season. You joined the year she left. How much do you know her?

A: I have met her a few times, but you have to understand that she and Tamra weren’t friendly. So Tamra would tell me things about her, and as a loyal friend, I just kept my distance from Gretchen because I was being loyal to my friend. That being said, I think she’s a wonderful addition. She and [her partner] Slade [Smiley] have been together 16 years. They share a daughter together. They’re so happy.

Q: She’s a better friend than Alexis?

A: Absolutely.

Q: A storyline that continues from last season involves Katie and Emily and includes their children. What’s the appropriate way for children of housewives to be portrayed on the show?

Q: For me, my kids understand that my goal is to be as authentic as I can, and to show what’s really happening in my life. Stella, who lives in Paris, she’s the daughter that least likes to film. At the same time, they understand that it’s part of the thing. And I love the idea that people have seen my twins from when they were 9 when we started and they just turned 21.

That being said, when it comes to children, it’s kind of this unspoken rule, I think, throughout the Bravo universe, that the kids are off-limits. Like, we can show them because we do want to show what’s going on in our family life. For instance, when I showed details of [her former husband’s] affair, we spoke to my children first. We spoke to our church with the kids, we spoke to a therapist beforehand, so that they would be prepared for it.

But you don’t attack children. Women sign up for the show, but the kids should not be hurt, and the men should not be hurt either unless they get involved.

Q: I do enjoy your relationship with your daughters. Like when Stella called from a rave in Belgium and you asked her what happens if you do drugs and she kind of smirked and said, “You die!”

A: Since they were little, I would pull the car over [when talk of drugs came up]. “You’re going to die!” Does it upset me that she’s in Europe, going to flippin’ concerts at 2:30 in the morning? Yes. But at the same time she’s got to grow up, and I hope that I’ve given her the tools so that she makes smart choices.

Q: You were just on “Love Hotel” a few months ago, looking for love. How was that?

A: It was so amazing. Just so much fun. It came at the perfect time, because it was right kind of at the year mark where I hadn’t dated. I thought, OK, I’m ready to go have fun. RHOC was airing, so it was a nice diversion for me for a month to get out of town, where we didn’t have access to the show [The Bravo series was shot in Cabo San Lucas].

I had a really fun time. I tried with Earl [her dating candidate on the show]. It didn’t work.

Q: The host posted some really harsh criticisms of you online after the show ended.

A: It was a shock to me. The last time I saw him he had tears in his eyes, saying, ‘Congratulations.’ I had some very emotional moments with him. There’s no explaining.

Q: It occurred to me watching the premiere that the one male who is always there for you is Archie, your golden retriever.

A: He’s a very good boy. He’s kind of adjusted himself to my schedule, and he’s very protective of me. He’s the sweetest dog ever. I mean, he’ll bark, but he’ll be wagging his tail at the same time.

As he performed at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach on Tuesday, with five more shows in Los Angeles in the coming week, that sentiment came back time after time in a concert that opened with all seven tracks on “Seven Psalms,” his most recent album, and a second set of hits and deep cuts from across his long career.

Let’s start near the end with “The Boxer,” one of three Simon & Garfunkel songs in the set. It’s the story of a poor boy and a boxer, struggling to survive in a harsh world. But as Simon sang the final verse, ” ‘I am leaving, I am leaving,’ but the fighter still remains,’” the song seemed also about its author in the late twilight of his career.

Simon, 83, had thought he was done with the road. Homeward Bound: The Farewell Tour, which played three nights at the Hollywood Bowl in 2018, was supposed to be it, though it almost never is for any artist who’s ever said they were through.

But Simon came to believe it truly was the conclusion; his hearing loss convinced him he’d not be able to hear his band well enough to ever step on stage again.

Then “Seven Psalms” arrived, seven songs that came to him as an interconnected suite of meditative reflections on life, love and the world and universe around us.

After its release in 2023, Simon embarked on A Quiet Celebration Tour in April which reached Long Beach on Tuesday and continues with five nights at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles over the week ahead.

Simon walked on stage at the Terrace Theater to a standing ovation, the audience joyful not just for one more tour, but that he’d made it to Long Beach at all. The show was originally scheduled for Monday but was bumped back after back problems led to back surgery about five days ago to alleviate the pain and allow him to continue.

“I’m very grateful for the chance to be here,” Simon said, before explaining the structure of the show – all of the new album in the first set, then after a break, a second set of “hits and songs that I meant to play and never got to.”

Certainly, many in the audience had little or no experience with “Seven Psalms,” a collection that deserves serious listening and study. These are not songs every fan knows by heart, such as “Graceland,” which opened the second set, or “The Sound of Silence,” which closed out the encore.

They’re quieter contemplative tunes, perhaps an elegy for Simon’s life and career, the last testament, maybe, of one of the greatest-ever American singer-songwriters.

“The Lord” opened the show as it does the album, its narrator questioning the nature of the universe and its creation. “When the cold wind blows the seeds we gather from the gardener’s glove live forever,” Simon sang.

“Nothing dies of too much love,” he finished with a line he told Stephen Colbert on a recent episode of “The Late Show” is something of a theme for “Seven Psalms.”

At 83, Simon’s voice is definitely a softer instrument than it once was, with a waver here, a quaver there as he made his way through the night. But a great artist adapts to the changes of time, and Simon has done that here. His vocals remain emotive and true despite a fragility that sometimes creeps in, and the song choices and arrangements are crafted to place his voice and acoustic guitar in the best possible settings.

Other highlights of the first set included “My Professional Opinion,” a gently swinging, bluesy number that energized the crowd after the somber opening numbers. “Your Forgiveness” arrived with lovely accompaniment on flute, violin and cello.

“Trail of Volcanos” felt inspired by Simon’s early days as a troubadour. “When I was young I carried my guitar down to the crossroads and over the seas,” he sang, a lyric inspired perhaps by his pre-fame travels to the folk scene in England. “Now those old roads are a trail of volcanoes exploding with refugees.”

After “Sacred Harp,” for which Simon’s wife, singer-songwriter Edie Brickell, shares the vocals, the first set closed with “Wait,” the clearest expression of Simon’s gaze upon the nightfall that approaches.

“Wait. I’m not ready yet, I’m just packing my gear,” he sang with Brickell adding harmony vocals. “Wait. My hand’s steady, my mind is still clear.”

And then, in the final lines: “Heavеn is beautiful, it’s almost like home. Children! Get ready it’s time to come home.”

Heavy stuff, sure, but as beautiful as any songs he’s written, and well worth the time spent with the record before or after these shows.

After a break, Simon and his band, which sometimes numbered as many as 12 when Brickell joined in, returned for a healthy round of more familiar tunes, though not all of them were the big hit singles of his catalog.

A mostly acoustic version of “Graceland” kicked off the second – remember, this is a quiet celebration, and gentler stuff surely works best with Simon’s ears these days. With bassist Bakithi Kumalo on stage, the band on tour includes the last living member of the original “Graceland” band of African musicians with whom he made that album.

Fan favorite “Slip Slidin’ Away” got the audience softly singing along, and two songs later, they cheered loudly at the opening notes of “Homeward Bound,” the first of three Simon & Garfunkel tunes in the show.

A pair of rarer tracks arrived next. “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” which was inspired by the deaths of the R&B singer of its title, President John F. Kennedy, and John Lennon, had been played live less than 30 times before this tour, according to online performance trackers.

“St. Judy’s Comet,” a song written after the 1972 birth of Simon’s eldest son, Harper, had only shown up in setlists 10 times before the tour. With a gorgeous arrangement that featured Nancy Stagnitta on flute, it’s a special treat for fans on this tour.

Other highlights of the latter part of the show, during which Simon’s voice grew stronger than the first set, included the wonderfully titled “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War,” which showed off the violin, cello and vibraphone in the band, and a pair of songs, “Spirit Voices” and “The Cool, Cool River,” from his album “The Rhythm of the Saints.”

“Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” closed the main part of the show, fans once more singing along and cheering for Brickell who popped out once more to whistle a verse of the melody.

The encore opened with the introduction of drummer Steve Gadd, whom Simon noted had just come to New York City as a young man when they recorded “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” one of Simon’s biggest solo hits (and an iconic drum intro). “The Boxer” was beautiful both in performance from the stage and the huge audience chorus taking over on the “lie-la-lie” choruses.

Then, after bows for the band, Simon stayed for one last song, playing “The Sound of Silence” to close his show as he’s done for many, many years. There’s perhaps a deeper poignancy in its opening line – “Hello darkness, my old friend” –  these days, and tenderness of feelings between Simon and the audience, all of them older now than when this Simon & Garfunkel song arrived.

Simon has said the song is about the inability of people to communicate. On Tuesday, everyone in the theater heard and felt him loud and clear and beautifully.

“If I really go very, very far back, my parents brought back from America, where they were students and met and got married, some soundtracks that were in the house,” Desplat says on a recent video call from Paris. “Like George Duning’s score of ‘Picnic’ or ‘Cowboy,’ these very, very ’50s kind of scores.

“Hearing that at home, and my love of cinema that also grew as I was maybe 12 or 13, I just loved the fact that you could hear in so many movies different types of music,” he says.

“You could hear Nino Rota and Fellini have a strange circus-y kind of orchestra, or sometimes just a very intimate kind of band. Or you could have Maurice Jarre and his huge symphonic scores.

“And then I heard John Williams,” says Desplat, 63, of his encounter at a French cinema with “Star Wars” in the summer of 1977. “That sealed it for good.”

Williams, 93, is widely acclaimed as the great living composer of film scores. His music, often conducted by him, an annual highlight of most Hollywood Bowl summer seasons, with nights dedicated to themes from movies such as “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jaws,” and many more.

Now Desplat gets to follow in his hero’s footsteps. On Tuesday, July 15, he will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl for a night titled The Cinematic Scores of Alexandra Desplat.

The program includes music from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Shape of Water,” for which Desplat won Oscars, as well as music from movies such as “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” his first score for an American or British production, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” “Godzilla,” and more.

“It feels like being honored, being happy,” Desplat says of his debut on the Hollywood Bowl stage. “In the late ’80s, early ’90s, I did see some jazz concerts there. And, of course, later I saw John Williams. Who else can you see at the Hollywood Bowl with the laser sabers, laser swords?

“I’m really impressed,” he continues. “It’s a huge venue and it’s a huge honor to be able to be there, especially with the LA Phil.

“So, you know, I need to get ready,” he adds with a laugh.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Desplat talked about the origins of his interest in film music, working the same directors, and why John Williams remains the standard by which all film composers are measured.

Q: Tell me how you selected the scores for the Hollywood Bowl show. Was it to focus on frequent collaborators like Wes Anderson? The Oscar winners?

A: Well the first choice was to present only the Anglo-Saxon scores. Meaning British, American. I’m not playing any French scores at all, or European scores. Anyway, the U.K. is not in Europe anymore.

The second aspect was to find scores that could be symphonic, because we were playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so we needed to be able to translate to this large ensemble of musicians. So many scores that were too intimate were set aside, or that included too many ethnic instruments like “Argo” or “Syriana.” Great movies and scores that I cherish but we couldn’t play them.

And I had to work on suites that could expand some of the scores. Like for the Wes Andersons [the program includes music from Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and “The French Dispatch”} they’re quite intimate for a huge symphony orchestra so I had to adapt that to a larger amount of musicians.

And then it’s trying to mix some old things, some good things, some bad … some things. [He laughs]

Q: I’m sure there are no bad things in there. Though you say there are surprise performances so who knows what you’ll pull out.

A: I wish I could play some of the latest stuff, but [time] was too short to [include] some of the scores I just recorded. “Jurassic World: Rebirth” or “Frankenstein,” which I recorded last week. [In addition to those two films, moviegoers also heard his work this year in Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme.”]

Q: You mentioned how it was to see “Star Wars” and hear John Williams’ score. Tell me a little bit about how a director and composer work together to enhance the movie experience?

A: Well, first of all, I would say that my passion for music kind of jumped over the 19th century. I loved the Baroque era, the classical era, and then the Romantic era was not my cup of tea. Maybe because my sisters played piano all the time and I heard Schumann and Schubert and Liszt and on and on. And I’m not a pianist.

So all that took me to the 20th century, and in the 20th century you have Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel. You have jazz. And in John Williams’s music, you had all that. Shostakovich . Everything was kind of digested and reformulated. And it could be with Spielberg or Lucas or whoever he was working with, I could hear all that together.

I think that looking at these tandems, I mentioned Nino Rota [and Fellini], Maurice Jarre and David Lean, and François Truffaut and George Delerue. What I learned from these tandems – Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann – is that their style crystalized at the proximity of these directors. And all these composers had a great instinct about how music and picture could live together, which is a very specific job.

I know many, many composers who’ve said through the years, “Oh yeah, I will compose music for films.” But no, you have to love cinema for that. You have to love living with images day and night, and somehow living with the director’s point of view for many weeks.

And accept that you are part of the big machine, bigger than you are, bigger than your ego, bigger than your music, and that your music has to live and dance with this machine. And so the tandems were very inspiring on that because they lasted for long. They still do for John, for JW, which is fantastic.

Q: The loyalty between the director and composer is important to the overall film?

A: When I was hoping that a relationship would last and it would not, I was always a bit sad in my early years of composing for films. I was all very naive, thinking, “I’m going to work with him forever. But I learned my lesson quite early on. A collaboration that might become a duet, unfortunately does not always become a duet.

I was lucky with Stephen Frears, who I did not mention but who I did many movies with, and he was a fantastic friend and marvelous director. But through the years, some of them took another path or chose other composers, and that’s the way it is.

But I admire directors who are faithful to their composers. Actually, very often I’m asked, “Oh, what other direct would you like to with?” I say, “Well, the ones that I’ve fancied, they already have great composers, so I can’t name them.”

Q: You’ve done seven movies with Wes Anderson, the same with Roman Polanski, and almost that many with Stephen Frears, George Clooney. How does that kind of bond benefit the work on a film?

A: The work is as demanding as the first time. You have the same desire to bring to the film something that has not yet appeared, that the music will bring out. You want the director to be as excited as the first time. And you know that he trusts you because he calls you again, which means this loyalty and trust actually gives you more courage to be adventurous. Because you know the director will respond to that.

So you feel freer, and at the same time constrained because you’re still working for the film. But it’s fantastic when the director trusts you, because it means that your art will have more wings.

Some directors, they’re afraid of your wings. That’s the worst experience because they feel that music is a danger or something they can’t really grasp. And that’s very, very difficult for composers. They want to feel the trust, because the more the director trusts you the more you will give to him.

Q: How do you understand what makes one score a favorite of viewers or listeners and another one, which might be just as good, not so much. “The Grand Budapest” and “Shape of Water” both won Oscars, BAFTAs. But you probably think just as highly of films that didn’t get awards.

A: It’s such a complex combination of things, I think, to win an Oscar. So many fantastic composers have never won, or won one, and you go, “What? Didn’t he win 10 times for this 10th marvelous score?”

I think it’s a really combination of the theme of the year, the flavor of the year. How much the music is important to the film. How much you hear it and how much it’s integrated or interwoven to the dramaturgy. And what’s around you at the time? How many other movies that have great scores.

And how the movies are received. Because if the movie is not received, your score can be the most genius score you’ve ever written, but if the movie is not well-received you go back into the queue for next year.

Q: What was it like winning your Oscars?

It’s fabulous, you know, because I’m French and I’ve dreamed of Oscars and American cinema since I am 14 or 15, and suddenly it happens. You don’t really realize that, because you’ve worked hard and boom, you’re on stage and it’s just a joy and happiness. You receive messages from your friends of the time who say to you, “You always said you wanted to be a Hollywood composer.” Did I?

It’s a great moment of success because getting an Oscar, for those who know the history of cinema, it’s a fabulous moment, of course. It means your work is loved by people you that you work with and work for so it’s very moving.

Q: You know John Williams, and this year, with “Jurassic Park: Rebirth,” you worked with themes he created. Tell me about him and what he’s accomplished.

A: To me, he’s always been the maestro. The only other maestro that I cherished was Nino Rota, I mean, at that level, and my two French predecessors, Maurice Jarre and George Delerue. So he’s in that league, except that he is still alive and all the other ones are gone.

Music is in his veins, you know? It just comes out of him, flawlessly. I mean, so many scores he’s written that you go, ‘Wow!” Every bar is so sophisticated, every idea is so perfect, every orchestration is just right and each works with the film and one another.

The magic of John Williams’s legacy is that he writes things that you’ve never heard before and that’s pretty hard. That’s really difficult. So many scores you hear, you know, they sound like Smetana or Dvorak or Tchaikovsky, or something so bad you don’t want to hear it again. [He laughs]

And John, it sounds like John Williams and you want to hear it again and again and learn from it. That’s the best thing I can say, that you learn from every score that John Williams has written. Not only musically, as I said, but also how it works for cinema. He invented something that wasn’t invented before him.

That kind of show leads to a lot of smiling faces, and at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, smiles filled the aisles, though the broadest was Fogerty’s as he sang and played guitar in a set that packed 24 songs, 18 of them Creedence Clearwater Revival classics, into almost two hours on stage.

“I am so frickin’ happy to be here at the Hollywood Bowl,” he hollered after kicking off this stop on the Celebration Tour with the swampadelic rock of “Bad Moon Rising” and the revved-up tempos of “Up Around the Bend.”

“You know I just got my songs back so I’m gonna sing every one of them,” Fogerty continued. “So let’s go!”

“Green River” and “Born on the Bayou” followed, and it bears repeating that nobody looked happier than Fogerty, who turned 80 in May, on stage playing songs he wrote with Creedence Clearwater Revival in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

He’s a naturally cheerful fella, coming off like the oldest, most knowledgeable cowboy in the bunkhouse with his red bandana tied around his neck, his trademark blue plaid shirt, blue jeans and a denim jacket. But the 50-year battle over the publishing rights to the songs he wrote and unwittingly sold in a disadvantageous youthful deal is over now.

Two years ago he wrested control of his publishing rights back, giving him say over how they are used in media such as movies, television, and advertisements, and that’s clearly a weight lifted, judging from the cheerfulness with which Fogerty chatted with the crowd and shared stories all night.

Like this: In 1969, he bought his first Rickenbacker guitar, Fogerty noted as his guitar tech brought that instrument to him, and modified it with a Les Paul humbucker pickup “because I heard about these guys over in England called Jimmy, Eric and Jeff.

“This is the part of the show where I’ve got to say, ‘Go ask your grandpa!” he added before sharing what grandpa would: Jimmy, Eric and Jeff are the guitar heroes also known as Page, Clapton and Beck.

He played that guitar at Woodstock and on nearly every Creedence hit that followed in the next few years before life went south on him.

“By 1972, my girlfriend left me, my band broke up, and my dog bit me,” Fogerty continued. “I was really down. And this 12-year-old kid came up to me and said, ‘Hey John, can I have one of your guitars?’ And for some reason, I gave my most precious guitar to him, and I didn’t see my guitar for a long time.”

Unbeknownst to him, his wife Julie tracked the Rickenbacker down decades later and wrapped it up under the Christmas tree for him a few years back.

“The most beautiful thing is after 44 years I got my baby back,” he said, before launching into “Who’ll Stop the Rain” one of the songs he wrote on it, as clips of muddy rained-on hippies at Woodstock which inspired the tune flashed across the screen behind him.

The video screen underscored both the historical era in which these songs were born and the messages within their lyrics, many of which still feel particularly relevant today.

“Effigy,” a Creedence song off the album “Willie and the Poor Boys,” was the rarest track of the night. Written during the events of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Nixon administration, the song is one that Fogerty has added to his sets in recent years.

“Last night I saw a fire burning on the palace lawn,” the first verse begins. “O’er the land the humble subjects watched in mixed emotion. Who is burning? Who is burning? Effigy.”

After “Run Through the Jungle,” during which footage of American soldiers in Vietnam was screened, and “Lodi,” a country rocker about being stuck someplace you’d rather not be, Fogerty paused to praise his family, another source of his current, happy circumstances. Sons Shane and Tyler Fogerty are both in his band, Shane on lead guitar, Tyler on rhythm, and they’ve been there with him for years now.

“Matter of fact my whole family is here tonight,” he said. “Everybody is here somewhere but my dog Creedence. We left him at home tonight.”

Noting that he and Julie recently celebrated their 34 wedding anniversary – “I got the golden ticket when I married Julie,” he added – Fogerty played “Joy Of My Life,” a sweetly earnest ode to his missus, the refrain of which included repeated acknowledgment that “I am the luckiest man alive.”

The back half of the set included another relative rarity, “Fight Fire,” a garage rocker from the pre-Creedence days when the band was known as the Golliwogs, and a pair of lovely melodies, one fast, one slow, delivered via “Hey Tonight” and “As Long As I See the Light.”

The guitar boogie song “Keep on Chooglin’” opened with a long guitar solo and then rumbled through its bluesy grooves. “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” got maybe the biggest sing-along of a sing-along-filled night. And “Down On the Corner,” which opened with just the right amount of cowbell, got the crowd onto their feet and dancing.

After a pair of solo hits, the baseball anthem “Centerfield,” which featured vintage baseball clips, and “The Old Man Down the Road,” Fogerty ended the main set with “Fortunate Son,” perhaps his most pointed political song, an angry shout against privileged young men who were able to avoid the Vietnam War in which the poor and minorities made up a majority of those who served.

It’s become, like many Creedence songs, an anthem that evokes American wars, though not always as its author intended. In a recent interview before Fogerty played the Glastonbury Festival, he expressed astonishment that the song had been played during President Donald Trump’s military parade.

“The song could’ve literally been written about him,” Fogerty told the reporter for the Telegraph.

Here, it had the crowd standing and singing again as Fogerty raced through it at a pace that almost left him breathless.

Following a short break, the encore arrived with Fogerty on stage alone to thank the crowd and his wife Julie one more time for her hard work to get back control of his music.

“It’s a really big deal to any writer of course,” he said of that victory. “I had a plan. My plan was I outlived all those sons of bitches!”

Now he’s taken a page from Taylor Swift’s playbook and recorded a new album, “Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years,” on which he and his band have re-recorded new versions of classic hits, each of them with the words “John’s Version” added to the titles.

Then, with “Travelin’ Band” and “Proud Mary,” this night of songs, all of them John’s versions now, wrapped up, their creator still smiling as he left.

There’s a reason for that, says actress Embeth Davidtz, who wrote and directed the film and also plays Bobo’s mother in the movie.

“Listen, she was cleaned up for that premiere,” Davidtz says on a recent video call. “In real life, if you just let her be, she would run around and have dirty feet.

“It’s one of the reasons I cast her,” she says. “I had met a lot of children who were really refined little girls, and I just needed an authentic, little non-acting creature to play this part.”

In “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” the story of Rhodesia’s transformation from a British colony into the independent nation of Zimbabwe is told through Bobo’s eyes. The character is real thanks to the absence of artifice in Venter’s performance in her first acting role of any kind.

“I’d seen a few actresses, very sweet kids trying but acting,” says Davidtz, who grew up South Africa just a few years prior to the events of the film in neighboring Zimbabwe. “The Facebook post I put out was I need a kid who’s untrained, absolutely never acted before. It was an absolute requirement for me because there’s a way that children act when they’re acting, right?

“I just said I need a barefoot, wild, preferably grubby little carefree child that doesn’t know anything about movies or filming,” she says. “Who closely resembles this wild Bobo that Alexandra Fuller wrote.

“And when I first saw Lexi she wasn’t as grubby as we ended up making her to look like Bobo, but she had a wildness to her and an unselfconsciousness. That’s really what it was. Her face was glorious. The camera loved her face. I knew that I wanted a cinematic face. She’s just adorable.”

Where Fuller’s memoir spans several decades, Davidtz narrowed the focus of the story to the few months of 1980 when years of civil war ended with independence for Zimbabwe and the election of Robert Mugabe, one of the leaders of the rebel forces, as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister.

In the lead-up to the election, Bobo watches as the adults in her world fret over the future that approaches. Her mother Nicola, played by Davidtz, struggles with alcoholism and mental illness while her father Tim (Rob Van Vuuren) is sent with a militia to fight rebels at the border

Bobo’s closest friend is the family’s nanny and housekeeper Sarah (Zikhona Bali), who loves the girl even as her coworker Jacob (Fumani Shilubana) warns Sarah that she risks being seen as a collaborator with her White employers.

Davidtz, who was born in the United States to South African parents, moved back to that country in 1974 when she was 8 years old; she says she wanted to make a movie of Fuller’s memoir for years, drawn to it by how it mirrored so many moments of her own life.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Davidtz, whose resume includes memorable roles in films such as “Schindler’s List,” “Matilda,” and “The Amazing Spider-man,” talked about the appeal of the source material, how she accidentally ended up a first-time writer-director, and how the themes of her film remain relevant 45 years after the events it depicts.

Q: How soon after Alexandra’s book was published in 2001 did you come across it?

A: I actually read it right after it came out and I was wowed. Every person that I knew in England and Southern Africa, and even people in America and Australia were like, “Gosh, you’ve got to read this woman’s book. So I read it and I was thunderstruck by how she captured the world, a world that was similar to the world that I grew up in.

But also just the brilliance of her writing. She’s very funny, she’s very exacting. She’s very sort of relentless in what she exposes about herself and her family, but she does it in a loving way.

And more than anything, that character of Bobo. It was like a Scout from “To Kill a Mockingbird” or, oh gosh, the Tatum O’Neal character in “Paper Moon.” And I thought, God, this would just make such a great film.

Cut to years later, I was thinking of what would be an interesting part, something I’d be interested in developing, and I thought of her. And the rights happened to be available.

Q: When was that, and how did you proceed once you had the rights?

A: It was about 2016, 2017. I think I spent a long time on the screenplay. I thought I’d find a writer. I couldn’t find a writer. So I did probably 25, 30 drafts myself, slowly. Because the book is very long. The book spans 20-something years and I just made it about a very short space of time at the end of the war.

Q: Why did cut it down to that moment?

A: Oh my gosh, I stumbled around and I was writing an epic, what would have ended up being a mini-series. Then slowly I realized, the reason I wanted to do it was because I wanted to play the part of Nicola, but as I went along with all my various drafts, I realized, really, the story is Bobo’s story.

The biggest moment of clarity came when I realized, oh no, I have to tell it entirely from the child’s point of view because then I can put in all the racial things I need to. All the prejudice, all of the learned behavior, all of the voice of that kid that was clear in her book.

Q: The point of view let you have Bobo ask adults in her world questions like, “Are we racist? Are we Africans?”

A: Exactly. She can talk about “Africans not having last names.” She can talk about “Don’t be friends with them.”

Q: Had you always intended to write, direct and act? Or did that just kind of happen?

A: It started out as, “I want to play this part, so I’m going to acquire the rights and I’ll find a writer, and then I’ll find a director.” Then as things went along, I couldn’t find a writer, so I wrote it. Then once I’d written it, once I’d gone through my 25 or 30 drafts, I knew it so well that I thought, “How can I hand this over to somebody else?”

I thought, gosh, I know every angle, every frame, everything I want to be in slow motions, everything. I knew what it needed to be. I just thought, I think I know how to do it. I mean, it was a very risky thing to do and very scary. There wasn’t a day I wasn’t terrified. Even while I was editing I was terrified, thinking, who do I think I am doing this?

But I kind of knew on some level instinctively I just know this story in my cells and in my bones. I know how to tell it. So I stuck with it. Then I didn’t really want to act in it anymore. I’d made the part of the mother much smaller and that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was telling the story.

Q: It’s interesting how you started out not wanting to write or direct and ended up not wanting to act – but then did all three.

A: Yeah, not something I would recommend. [She laughs] It was hard. And in the end, I was the least expensive option, so it was great. I didn’t have to really pay for myself and I could minimize the amount that I had to be on camera.

Q: What was it like directing Lexi, who as you said didn’t know anything at all about acting or filmmaking?

A: In my meetings with her, when I taped her, she was dead keen to light up a cigarette [as the movie has her do] and enjoyed pretending to puff on a cigarette. The way I got her to [deliver her lines] was to have two cameras on her at all times, one very close, one sort of medium. She could say a line the way I told her to say it and then do it a line at a time.

She was very good at even bringing her own expression to things. Sometimes she’d change a sentence. She’d forget a word and say it the wrong way, but the wrong way was the right way. It’s just who she is and a perfect melding of what Alexandra Fuller created, what I wrote and directed, and what she brought to it as a blank canvas as herself that worked.

Q: Is she from a rural part of South Africa? Was she comfortable on location there?

A: As comfortable as a child could be. People at one point said, “Why don’t we look in England?” I said there’s no English child that can run around barefoot in the wild with her dog. That was her dog. I always had her dog in scenes with her.

I said, Don’t brush your hair in the morning and most times her hair wasn’t brushed. So I didn’t have to do anything but I could put dirt on her face. She lives in a small town but she runs around barefoot all the time. She seldom wears shoes so that was easy. It was close to casting to type as I could have found for the character of Bobo.

Q: Zikhona Bali also has a beautiful presence on screen, though she’s much, much quieter and calmer as Sarah than Lexi is as Bobo.

A: Zikhona was a gift to me because, first of all how she worked with Lexi, because Lexi is a lot. I only had three hours a day with her. It’s hard for her to focus and concentrate. And Zikhona was like a glass of cold water. She just would cool things down. She would stabilize Lexi. Again, it was like a lightning bolt, absolutely clear that this was the person to play the part. She’s just wonderful.

Q: You were born and lived in the United States until you were 8 – about the same age as Bobo. What was your experience like moving to South Africa then?

A: I moved from New Jersey, so I had only known lovely green rolling hills and yellow school buses, even though my parents had come from South Africa. So moving at the time we did was incredibly traumatic for me. We were almost immediately in a state of emergency. Soweto riots began. There were always police in this sort of military state.

So my very gentle sort of American childhood was kind of ripped apart when we came to South Africa. Now, my parents were oblivious. Differently to how the Fullers are oblivious but my parents were just back in South Africa, living with something that they knew. They didn’t necessarily agree with it but they didn’t do much to make it OK for us.

That’s why I think I’m so obsessed with telling a story from a child’s point of view. Because that moment in time, exactly the age of Bobo, really resonates for me as a difficult time and a very scary time. All of that stuck with me so that when I read Alexandra’s book I so recognized what she described as the terror of being a kid. It doesn’t leave us. It’s in there. So when I got to tell the story I feel in some way I got to exorcise the stuff that I’d always felt and kept inside.

Q: It’s 45 years since the events depicted in the film. How do you hope the film will speak to today’s times?

A: There’s a twofold thing I’d say. One is, you know, people should know when they look at African countries and form conclusions about them and the way that things are done there, that the African countries inherited what was handed to them after colonialism. It’s sort of what Sarah represents and what I was trying to show at the end of the film. That there’s this beautiful elevated character to the Indigenous people of Zimbabwe, of South Africa.

So I would want people to look at that and know that’s there, and read about it and learn about it. I think that there’s nobility in trying to fix the mess that they were handed after colonialism ended.

Then the other thing I’d say is for people to look around the world at the wars that are going on everywhere, and everywhere there are children watching. So Bobo’s experience of being in the middle of not only a family coming undone on the inside, but a world outside of violence is everything we see on the news every day.

There are the Bobos of the world watching and living through it. You know, we don’t learn, but it would be nice if we did. If it stopped somehow.

After all, Peterson cofounded the Bangles in 1981 with her sister Debbi Peterson, Susanna Hoffs, and bass player Annette Zilinskas (who would be replaced by Michael Steele). And from the mid-’60s, Cowsill was a member of the Cowsills with siblings Bill, Bob, Barry, and Susan Cowsill, as well as their mother Barbara Cowsill.

That’s a lot of musical legacy between them, but no, there was nothing more than the occasional backing vocals for friends or fellow musicians over the years, until April when the first-ever Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill album, “Long After the Fire,” arrived.

Maybe that’s how it was meant to be, though. The album is a collection of covers of songs written by Bill Cowsill, who died at 58 in 2006, after a long run of poor health, and Barry Cowsill, who died at 50 in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina tore through his then-hometown of New Orleans.

“The idea was floating around for years and years,” Peterson says on a recent phone call with Cowsill. ” And some of the songs have been in our world for decades, including the song ‘Don’t Look Back,’ which was recorded by the Cowsills back in 1970. So as a kid and a Cowsills fan, I knew that song and loved it.

“It was an idea John and I talked about for a long time, and then finally, circumstances kind of came to the point where we were able to start recording together,” she says. “We have a studio here in our home, but John was touring with the Beach Boys for 23 years, and was rarely actually physically home. So it took a while to actually get into the studio and make the commitment to, like, we’re going to do this.”

Recording together isn’t the only thing Cowsill, 68, and Peterson, 67, have learned. With only one or two exceptions, they’d never shared a live stage either.

“It’s brand new,” Cowsill says, as both laugh. “We were just a domestic couple for, like, the longest time of our relationship. I mean, other than playing 20 years at Bill’s benefit, singing ‘A Thousand Times’ [which is now on their album] of all songs, we never really did anything together. Unless occasionally somebody would send us a file and ask us to put vocals on it, and we’d go downstairs in the studio and put vocals on other people’s stuff.

“Then we’d come upstairs and make dinner and that was it,” he says.

“We’re a baby band,” Peterson says. “We’re the oldest baby band in the world.”

“Because nobody knows who we are really,” Cowsill adds. “That’s why, like, Vicki wanted to call it the Peter-Sills – “

“No, I didn’t,” she says in mock offense as both laugh again.

“OK, but she wanted to name us something else than our names,” says Cowsill, who earlier this year toured with the Smithereens in place of the late singer Pat DiNizio. “I said, ‘No way, we need all the help we can get. Somebody might recognize those names and answer the phone when we call.’”

The couple has played a handful of shows over the last year now, and on Thursday, July 10, come to the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton to perform songs from “Long After The Fire” as well as possibly a Cowsills or Bangles song or two, too.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Peterson and Cowsill talked about how they picked the songs from Bill and Barry Cowsill’s individual catalogs, what it was like taking on songs for loved family members who no longer alive, and why Peterson says Cowsill was inconsiderate on the day they first met some 47 years ago now.

Q: My understanding, John, is that ‘”Is Anybody Here” was the song that got the ball rolling when Paul Allen [who produced the record] called you from Nashville one day.

Cowsill: That’s right, yep. He was in Nashville and I was playing with the Beach Boys in Memphis and he called me up and asked me randomly: Do I want to record at Sun Studio? And I kind of laughed and said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because you’ve been telling me about the Dead Brothers Project forever,’ and I kind of said, ‘Oh yeah sure.’

So we went there, it was a perfect choice. [“Is Anybody Here”] is a very Roy Orbison-y kind of melody and feel to it. It just was a beautiful place to record that song. It came out nice. So that started the project for sure.

Q: I’d heard that you and Vicki were calling this the Dead Brothers Project as you worked on it.

Cowsill: Yeah, we called it that forever. We were gonna even name it that, but then went on the internet and everybody has a ‘dead brothers’ something. To me, it was like that was risqué, but it wasn’t at all.

Q: Didn’t Bill used to do something where he’d only play songs by dead rock stars?

Cowsill: He said, ‘We only do dead guy music.’ So he would totally appreciate the Dead Brothers Project. My family’s pretty fun and dark like that.

Q: You chose six songs by each of Bill and Barry. Was it difficult to decide which ones to do?

Peterson: I would say it was easy, but there were definitely choices that had to be made. These were just the ones that rose to the top for us. We love the songs that Bill recorded with his bands Blues Shadows and Blue Northern, but some of those songs on those albums Bill did not write, so they weren’t eligible.

And Barry just has a very eclectic songbook, and some of the stuff is quite out there and quite particular to his artistry. We had to really think about that, like that’s so Barry, how can we put ourselves into that song and perform it and find a way that would feel comfortable doing that? Because he was such a character in so many ways. The guy was like a vaudeville character or something.

Cowsill: He didn’t do a lot of cowriting. He wrote for himself. Bill always loved writing with other people. Him and Jeffrey Hatcher wrote a lot of songs on the Blue Shadows, and Jeffrey is an incredible songwriter. Those guys tell stories even if it didn’t happen to them. They can get outside themselves. But Barry is very personal. He lives by example.

Q: What was a song of Barry’s you did that you had to really think about including?

Peterson: I would say “Ol’ Timeless.’ It’s just his voice and sort of a harmonium sound, and so, so personal that it felt a little ballsy in a way to take a stab at it. We wanted to honor the almost spiritual quality of that song, but then frame it very differently musically. That one was like, we’re taking kind of a giant step here.

Cowsill: And it pertains to people on the outside. Like, we couldn’t do a song like “My Car Don’t Lock.” It’s so Barry. I mean, you could do any of them, but it’s still very stylized. I wouldn’t want to mess with it.

Q: Bill and Barry have been gone for about 20 years now. I’d imagine that working on this record stirred some strong memories of them for you both.

Peterson: I knew them mostly as a fan. But I did spend quite a bit of time with Barry because he lived in New Orleans at the same time that I did, so we crossed paths many times there. I had a couple of misadventures with Bill in the ’90s at South By Southwest, but he was mostly a guy on the other end of the phone for me.

I was just hoping and believing that Barry would be very happy to have this project out in the world. He said more than once – actually we’re sitting in our kitchen right now, and he said it in this very room. One night, he goes, “I just want my music to be heard. I just want it to be heard.” That’s what I keep thinking about

Cowsill: Yeah, we’re reintroducing these songs that have been out before, and so it’s a reawakening of the songs. I always bonded with Bill – in later years we did. He basically raised some of us. Me, for sure. Trained me as a musician and a singer. I consider him our Brian Wilson in our family.

Q: In the making of the record, you must have gotten to know each other musically in ways that were new and different.

Cowsill: Just discovering how we sound together, we were kind of smiling at each other. Said, ‘Oh, this is good.’ Because we started in the living room, you know. The first time we realized that we have a nice blend together was like, ‘OK, we can definitely do this. This is going to be fun.’

And it has been fun. We smile and laugh a lot. If anybody’s a hothead it’s me. I have to put notes on the table telling me, “Be patient. Be calm. Don’t get mad.” Because, you know, I want to hurry up and figure out what’s going on, and sometimes it takes people a little bit longer to do stuff, and you have to be patient.

Q: As you were figuring things out, what were the songs where you had that feeling of ‘this is working’?

Peterson: I think John mentioned “A Thousand Times.” That is a song that actually 21 years ago, we performed at a benefit for Bill to help raise some money for his medical needs. He was having some issues up in Canada and had no money.

So this wonderful concert was put on, hosted by the Cowsills mostly, but with great guests: Peter Tork [of the Monkees], Waddy Wachtel [musician and Bill’s close friend], Shirley Jones [who starred in “The Partridge Family” TV series, which was inspired by the Cowsills].

Q: And Barry’s song from your wedding is on the album, too.

Cowsill: I’ve always loved “Hearts Collide,” and Barry sang it at our wedding. I just love that song. I mean, yes, there’s just so many connections and dots connected doing this project on many, many levels. And it was a very moving project as well, because they’re not here.

Q: The wedding was in 2003, but I’d assume you knew each other for much longer, given the community of musicians in Los Angeles in which you both have traveled. How far back does your friendship go?

Cowsill: Well, I’m going to take a nap, and Vicki can tell you the story. [Both laugh]

Peterson: It’s not long at all. We date back to April 28, 1978.

Cowsill: We did not date.

Peterson: We were not dating. We met that day at a small club in Redondo Beach. But even if we hadn’t met that day – and you can look at it like sliding doors, like if life had worked out slightly differently – we probably would have met in the coming years because the Cowsills were already out and about playing again after many years of not working together.

I was a big Cowsills fan. I would have found them in some other club, Club Lingerie, at the Whisky, at the Troubadour.  At some point, I would have gone to see the Cowsills play, and I would have gone up and introduced myself, because my sister and my best friend and I were already playing in clubs ourselves at that time, just out of high school. And our paths did collide over and over again over the next couple of years.

But as far as personal relationships, no. We met in April, and by May, John was married to Wife No. 1. So that was very inconvenient and inconsiderate of him, I thought.

Then Susan Cowsill and I became very close friends. [They formed the duo the Psycho Sisters and were also members of the Continental Drifters.] So I was just like Susan’s friend for many years to John, I think. Just those girls who used to hang out at rehearsals, and now they’re on MTV.

Q: So, at some point after John’s no longer married and you started to date?

Peterson: We never dated until after Wife No. 2.

Cowsill: I collect the whole series.

Peterson: He does. He was practicing, and he did very well. He’d kind of got it down.

Q: And now that you’ve discovered the joy of performing together – another album, more shows?

Cowsill: We’re planning on going forward. An album will be in the works eventually. But we haven’t really toured yet. We’re happy to have the date in Fullerton. So we’ll see if they come. We want them to come. They’re gonna have a great time, because we’re fun. Let’s see what happens.

Vicki Peterson & John Cowsill

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 10

Where: The Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave, Fullerton

How much: $40

For more: See themuck.org/program/2025/07-10 for tickets and information.

It had a catchy melody with a chugging beat and lyrics that anyone whose summer wasn’t going to plan could appreciate.

The vibe fit any summer that followed, whether in Cochran’s original or the many cover versions by artists as varied as the Who, Blue Cheer, the Flying Lizards, Buck Owens and Rush.

It was both a hit, cracking the Top 10 as the dog days of summer slipped into fall, and a mood that captured the essence of a season.

While there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues, there is, in fact, a formula for determining the songs of the summer, according to Billboard magazine, which has calculated the Top 10 songs of the summer going back to 1958 when the Billboard Hot 100 chart debuted.

The calculations are complicated, but suffice to say, they weigh factors such as sales, airplay, streaming, and chart placement between Memorial Day and Labor Day each summer.

But that formula resulted in Billboard declaring the 1958 song of the summer to be “Nel blu, dipinto di blu” by the Italian singer Domenico Modugno, which might make you wonder how much Billboard had to drink that summer.

You actually probably do know that song – it’s better known simply as the oft-covered standard, “Volare” – but does it make you think summery sentiments in the same way that “Summertime Blues” does? Of course not!

So we’ll reject the calculations of the Billboard bean counters and go for the vibes of a summer song, looking for tunes that were in the air in summers past and that focus more on the feeling of the season.

The Decade: 1960-1969

In 1960, surf music arrived with the new decade and the Ventures’ instrumental “Walk, Don’t Run,” which was soon followed by the Beach Boys‘ “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and Jan and Dean‘s “Surf City” in 1963.

More songs that captured the feeling of season – hanging out at the beach, driving around with your friends, the chance of romance – also charted during summer in the early ’60s including Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady (From Pasadena),” the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” and the Surfaris “Wipe Out.” And Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again,” of course, opens with a shoutout to summer – “Come on let’s twist again like we did last summer,” he sang in 1961.

The emergence of Motown and the British Invasion provided new soundtracks to summer love. You could dance to the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” a summer hit in 1964, and while it’s not summer-specific, the Rolling Stones “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” laid its irresistible riff beneath the same frustrated youthful feelings that “Summertime Blues” described.

By the latter half of the decade, rock reigned o’er the summer season. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In the City” has a pleading, catchy summer-centric energy. The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” proves that, as with “Satisfaction,” all you need is a huge riff and a universal summer sentiment: “I think I love you!”

In 1967, the Doors’ massive hit “Light My Fire” – alas, not about a beach bonfire – combined with singer Jim Morrison’s incendiary charisma to set fans alight. The Summer of Love centered in the Bay Area arrived with Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers),” while the long, hot summer of civic unrest in other parts of the country found its summer song in Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.”

This year, musical icons Sly Stone and Brian Wilson died within days of each other on the eve of summer. Both created some of the greatest summer songs of the ’60s.

Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” which arrived in August 1969, might be the summer single of the decade, while summer album honors go to Wilson and the Beach Boys for their May 1966 release “Pet Sounds,” which featured singles such as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” and “Good Vibrations.”

The Decade: 1970-1979

The ’70s introduced a pair of summer classics, with Mungo Jerry’s rollicking rhythms on the 1970 single “In The Summertime” accompanying a timeless narrative. “In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can stretch right up and touch the sky,” the song begins.

“Spill the Wine,” by Eric Burdon and War, mined a similar if more psychedelic groove that same year. The narrator, “out strolling one very hot summer’s day,” lies down to nap in a field of grass. “I lay there in the sun and felt it caressing my face as I fell asleep and dreamed,” Burdon sings to the single’s sensuous groove.

Two years later, 1972 arrived packed with summer songs. Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” crystallized the feeling of freedom that came with the final school bell of the year. Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” made us feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in our minds. And Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park” – think it was the Fourth of July? – perfectly encapsulated a summer’s day in the park.

Not every year had the same obvious riches. Paul Simon’s 1973 hit “Kodachrome” works as a summer song because the film of the title “give(s) us those nice bright colors, give(s) us the green of summer, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”

And sometimes, as the ’70s showed, a classic song is simply a perfect soundtrack to a party in the backyard or at the beach: In 1975 and 1976, songs from KC and the Sunshine Band, such as “Get Down Tonight” and “(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty,” got the summer fun started.

War returned sans Eric Burdon for a second helping of summer in 1976 with “Summer,” a slow jam with a chorus that declares “summer time is the best time any place, ’cause it’s summer, summer time is here … my time of year.”

The movie musical “Grease” provided the soundtrack to many a summer soiree in 1978, with the John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John duet “Summer Nights” a timeless summer song. “Summer lovin’, had me a blast,” Travolta’s Danny sings. “Summer lovin’, happened so fast,” Newton-John’s Sandy sings back. Summer romance, man, there’s nothing like it.

As for the summer song of the decade, there are worthy contenders above, but ultimately who wouldn’t vote for Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” a sing-along classic from 1977 that taught us all not to worry if you blow out your flip-flop or step on a pop-top – ask your grandparents, kids – as long as “there’s booze in the blender, and soon it will render, that frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”

The Decade: 1980-1989

Songs of summer shifted in the ’80s from literal themes of surf, sun and sand to the summer event. And by the middle of the decade, the biggest events were the summer blockbuster movies with their instantly ubiquitous theme songs.

Sure, we started off the decade with a few hits that harkened back to summer’s past. In the summer of 1980, Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” took listeners away on cotton candy clouds of the softest of soft rock on a quest for peace and freedom in a sailboat on the sea.

A summer later, Rick Springfield gave voice to a more desperate kind of summer lovin’ in the hit “Jessie’s Girl,” while the summer of ’82 found the Go-Go’s singing wistful melodies and memories with “Vacation.”

Then the movies took over, and your summer music became inextricably bound to the popcorn-scented memories of the big hits of the season.

Prince’s “When Doves Cry” from the movie “Purple Rain” and Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” from the film of the same name dominated the airwaves in 1984.

Even Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” which was released a year earlier, finally reached the Top 10 on the Billboard 100 thanks to its inclusion in the 1984 movie “The Karate Kid,” though weirdly it was left off the soundtrack album.

Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” made a splash in the summer of ’85, as did the summery sounds of Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” neither of them with help from a movie soundtrack. But the next year, “Top Gun” turned August and September 1986 into the summer of “Take My Breath Away,” thanks to the inclusion of the Berlin song on its soundtrack.

The latter part of the decade turned toward rising superstars whose music pumped through the open car windows of young people, and older folks too, as they cruised to the beach for a day and road trips out of town.

Whitney Houston scored the biggest hit of her then-young career with “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” as did U2 with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” – both of those in the summer of ’87.

A year later, Guns N’ Roses unleashed its signature song on the world with the 1988 hit “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which you surely would have heard echoing from cars on the Sunset Strip that summer.

The decade closed out with a hint of the rising clout of hip-hop in the ’90s, thanks to Spike Lee’s movie “Do The Right Thing” – a film set on a long, hot summer day in Brooklyn – for which the rap group Public Enemy provided a musical theme in “Fight The Power.” Released on July 4, 1988, it was surely the sidewalk boombox anthem of the decade.

The Decade: 1990-1999

The first big summer song of the ’90s arrived in 1991 when Will Smith was still the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff was – one sec, checking – ah, still DJ Jazzy Jeff.

“Guys out huntin’ and girls doin’ likewise, honkin’ at the honey in front of you with the light eyes,” Smith rapped in the duo’s hit “Summertime.” “And with a pen and pad I compose this rhyme, to hip you and to get you equipped for the summertime.”

Rap and R&B were ascendant in the early ’90s, though boy bands and pop divas had their say during the decade, too, as summer party season scooped up a wide range of hit singles.

Sir Mix-A-Lot could not and would not lie in 1992’s “Baby Got Back,” a song that takes place during that favorite summer activity of just driving around admiring all the good-looking people. Tag Team got countless summer parties started with 1993’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).” Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” was the summer of ’94’s ode to cruising the main drag looking for fun or trouble or both.

That same year, John Mellencamp and Meshell Ndegeocello updated Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” and its call to get out in the warmth of a summer night.

Jamaican-American reggae singer Shaggy did summer proud in 1995 with his Caribbean reggae-rap version of Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime,” a song so summery he got hired to perform it on an episode of “Baywatch.”

In 1996, well, 1996, you were a bit of a disappointment what with the biggest hit of your summer being the “Macarena” by Los Del Rio. You’ll remember this as the summer when every backyard barbecue, pool party or birthday party at some point included that silly dance.

Where Eddie Cochran complained in “Summertime Blues” about not having any money at all, the Notorious B.I.G. had an entirely different problem in summer 1997 in “Mo Money Mo Problems.”

Another future backyard party anthem arrived in 1999 with the Smash Mouth hit “All Star,” after which anyone who heard the words, “Hey now, you’re an all star,” instantly knew to reply, “Get your game on, go play.”

Not the greatest decade for enduring songs of summer, but maybe the 2000s will be better.

The Decade: 2000-2009

Or maybe it won’t be better. The first decade of the new millennium unfolded with plenty of hitmakers making hits, but did they make them about summer? Not so much, we’re sad to say.

Train had a big summertime hit in 2001 with “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me),” and it included drops of summer in the lyrics: “Now, that she’s back in the atmosphere, with drops of Jupiter in her hair, she acts like summer and walks like rain.”

Maybe that’s just a singular drop of summer.

A year later, Nelly had a massive hit, also during the summer months, with “Hot In Herre.” He’s from St. Louis, and we lived there for a few summers, and it’s brutal without air-conditioning, which the lyrics suggest he is lacking: “It’s gettin’ hot in here (So hot) / So take off all your clothes (Ayy).”

Definitely one way to deal with the heat indoors.

Summer pop hits also continued to celebrate the emotions of L-O-V-E. Beyoncé a huge hit with “Crazy In Love” in 2003. Two years later, Mariah Carey dominated the summer charts in 2005 in much the same way with “We Belong Together.”

The summer of 2006 we recall because everywhere you went you heard Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” soundtracked many a party that summer, too.

This is how dire the dearth of true summer songs got by 2007. Instead of celebrating fun in the sun, Rihanna had the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Summer Song chart that year with “Umbrella.”

By the end of the decade, the best we could hope for was a good party mix from the fresh hits on the charts. The Black Eyed Peas tried to provide that with two big summer-months hits in “I Gotta Feeling” and “Boom Boom Pow.”

Miley Cyrus gave us all an anthem for any Fourth of July gathering with “Party in the U.S.A.,” though it didn’t actually get released until August 2009.

The Decade: 2010-2019

Thank you, Katy Perry for reviving the summer song in 2010 with help from Snoop Dogg on “California Gurls,” an actual honest-to-Coppertone summer song.

“California girls, we’re unforgettable, Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top,” she sings in a song that includes just a tiny nod toward the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” in one of Snoop’s lines. “Sun-kissed skin so hot, we’ll melt your popsicle.”

That put us in such a mood that we don’t even mind telling you that the summer song of 2011, at least according to the Billboard charts, was “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO. Good, dumb fun in a summer shared with Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”

There’s catchy stuff in the next few years, none of it particularly summery other than the months in which it flooded your ears day in, day out. In 2012, it included Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Lana Del Rey did her moody thing with “Summertime Sadness,” which is a legit thing to feel in the summer, right?

DJ and producer Calvin Harris joined Katy Perry with a true summer song in 2014. How do we know what it is? The name of the song is “Summer,” duh. “When I met you in the summer to my heartbeat’s sound, we fell in love,” Harris sings, and while the song doesn’t really go anywhere – it’s a dance club banger after all – we’ll take it.

Taylor Swift and the Weeknd both had summer-bummer hits in 2016, Swift with “Bad Blood” and the Weeknd with “I Can’t Feel My Face.” Not really seasonal, but big, catchy hits that were everywhere.

The decade wrapped up with a run of summers dominated by one or two massive hits. “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee featuring Justin Bieber ruled the summer of 2017. A year later, “I Like It,” by Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin, took a chunk of Pete Rodriguez’s 1967 boogaloo classic “I Like It Like That,” and rode those Latin rhythms to the top of the summer charts.

The decade ended with the summer of “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, which again, wasn’t so much about summer as it had that summer vibe.

The Decade: 2020-2025

Welcome to the current decade, where we’re still not sure what to make of its summer songs or lack thereof.

Harry Styles showed he knows his way around a summer song. His 2020 summer hit “Watermelon Sugar” savors the lazy, warm days of the season.

“Tastes like strawberries on a summer evenin’ and it sounds just like a song,” he sings in the opening verse of the song. “I want more berries and that summer feelin’, it’s so wonderful and warm.”

A year later, the produce section returned to the summer charts with “Peaches” by Justin Bieber with Daniel Caesar and Giveon. “I got my peaches out in Georgia,” he sings – so far so good. “I get my weed from California” – hmm, maybe his summer plans are different than Harry’s.

BTS, though, rights the summer ship with its 2021 hit “Butter,” its members singing, “Smooth like (Butter), cool shade (Stunner), and you know we don’t stop, hot like (Summer), ain’t no (Bummer).”

Leaving the grocery store, we get to 2023 where country singer Luke Combs had a long-running hit with his cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” a song about a road trip though it’s definitely not a summer vacation.

To some degree, the verdict remains out on the summer songs of 2024 and 2025. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” was one of the biggest hits of summer 2024, but it lacks any kind of summer vibe unless being mean to Drake counts as a summer vibe to you.

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” both were hits that same summer, and there’s a natural sunniness to her music. She’s back this year with “Manchild,” so perhaps she’ll end up the queen of this decade’s summers in time.