Charlotte OC wrote “Start Of Summer” around a specific image: her father in the garden, factor 15, a glass of whiskey by his feet, a border collie beside him, waiting for the tan to come back. That picture is the song’s anchor. The longing is not for summer but for the person who made summer mean something.
The production holds the contradiction without naming it.
The production holds warmth, the surface refuses to name. Charlotte said: “the song is about not knowing what to do with love that has nowhere left to go, and the arrangement makes the same choice: keep the lightness, carry the rest underneath. The unfinished conversation stays”.
“Replaying conversations that will forever feel unfinished” is how she describes it, and the optimism she built into the track is his, borrowed from the man who knew the tan would come back. The song holds that borrowed certainty against everything that followed.
