Shawn Mendes’ “Stitches”: Meet Your Song of the Fall
“Song of the Fall” does not exist. In the pop music realm, the months-long “Song of the Summer” debate is promptly followed by Q4, which is a time for major album releases primed to stuff stockings and be gifted on the seventh night of Hanukkah. Everyone cares which summer song will be blasting from cranked-up boomboxes on beaches (people still do that, right?) and blaring from rolled-down car windows; no one cares about which pop song happens to be dominating October. There’s a reason most people can easily recite the biggest album of last fall (Taylor Swift’s 1989), but not the song that was riding high at No. 1 on the Hot 100 upon that album’s release (that one was Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” if you forgot too).
There’s nothing about a song that makes it a “fall” song in the same way that the breezy vibes of OMI’s “Cheerleader” or Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” perfectly encapsulate the slow unwind of summer. This is evident by glancing at the current Hot 100 chart: there’s nothing linking the styles of the Weeknd’s “The Hills,” Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?” and Fetty Wap’s “679” (aside from the fact that they’re all by male performers, natch). It’s a mishmash of sounds that coincidentally coexist on the radio during autumn. If anything, a song like “Hotline Bling” sounds like a phenomenal summer song that happened to be released in late July, too late for “Song of the Summer” contention.
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