An Ode to August
Written By : Hannah Corbett
I’ll never forget waking up the morning Taylor Swift announced folklore. It didn’t feel real. Missed calls from my friends who were just as obsessed—it was one of those moments where you check your phone and feel like you’ve woken up inside a dream. A grayscale, cottagecore, dream. It was July 2020, the heart of lockdown, and in the middle of the world holding its breath, Taylor gave us one of the most unexpected albums of her entire career.
Somehow, in the middle of a global pandemic, folklore made that summer good. And not just good—magical. We were all quarantined, cooped up, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, when this quiet, aching, poetic body of music entered our lives.
Now, I’ll be honest—when I first listened, I was scared. The production was different, the vibe was a departure. It was ethereal, stripped back, ghostly. But even before pressing play, my friends and I had already picked our tracks. It’s a little tradition of "claiming" songs before even hearing them, based purely on title alone. And I chose track 8: august.
It felt right. August is my birthday month. It’s my favorite time of the entire year. And august—the song—is the sonic equivalent of those late-summer days when the air feels like it's been drowning in salt, when the sun is a little gentler, and everything feels slightly more golden and hazy.
If the month of July is fireworks and sunburns and chasing time, August is soft. It’s stretch marks on summer’s skin. It’s when everything slows down just enough for you to notice the way light shifts through the blinds in your bedroom. It makes me want to re-read my favorite book in paperback that’s falling apart in your hands. It’s sentimental. It's fleeting. And I’ve loved it for as long as I can remember—I even have the word tattooed on the top of my foot.
So since tomorrow is August 1st, and I can already feel the salt air, and because I’m flying to New York today to drive down to Long Beach Island—where I plan to live out August 1st exactly the way it was meant to be lived—I just wanted to take a moment to look forward to it. Because before we know it, it’ll be all pumpkin and everything halloween and christmas and then its new years and then you blink and summer has been over for months. Even if you don't like Taylor Swift, and even if you are looking forward to fall, let August become a really really good memory this summer.