What makes the music video for Childish Gambino’s “Feels Like Summer” so brilliant is the fact it's completely unrelated to the song’s lyric. It follows a cartoon Donald Glover walking through a neighborhood, passing by celebrities doing normal summertime activities: playing basketball, riding bicycles, or just relaxing on the lawn. Yet, the song’s lyric highlights a subject far more profound: environmental degradation. 

"Air that kill the bees that we depend upon/Birds were made for singing waking up to no sound."

By contrasting the video with the lyric, I believe Donald Glover was trying to emphasize the public’s apathy towards this critical issue; we tend to fixate on celebrity culture while ignoring the destruction happening around us. 

As an advocate for climate causes, I resonated with this message, yet I was eager to experience the song without that any hidden layers. After all, there are very, very few songs in the singer-songwriter world about the environment, and the lyric has an extremely compelling message. So, I decided to cover it, putting it its lyric front and center while reimagining its instrumentation in a way that felt true to my style. 

While it retains much of chill atmosphere of the original, I’ve added a slightly uneasy edge to it. Out now on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, and Amazon Music!

Finally, check out this blog on the song by Performers on the Go!