[Photo courtesy of Kelley Lach]

By ACRN’s editorial team

It’s a well-known fact that Ohio University’s campus emerges in its fullest, most picturesque form in the fall. Yellow, orange, red and brown leaves complement the historic brick buildings and pathways and college students across campus don their finest cozy sweaters and trek to their preferred coffee shop in swarms. To give the cooler, gloomier forecast the welcome it deserves, the ACRN editorial team has chosen a selection of songs to appropriately celebrate the coming of the season.

“The Great Pumpkin Waltz” by Vince Guaraldi

We’d be remiss not to pay homage to the quintessential fall anthem for children and children-at-heart alike: Vince Guaraldi’s “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”. Nearing its 57th birthday, both the film and title track have withstood the test of time and have arguably transcended it entirely. The piano traces out the long familiar melody while the flute takes the long way home, plastic orange jack-o-lantern candy bucket in hand. Strings lull through the song, unhurried and unafraid of what dusk might hold. It’s the feeling of begrudgingly trick or treating in a long sleeve shirt that your parents made you wear under your costume, the feeling of classroom Halloween parties in elementary school and the feeling of falling asleep in the backseat of the car on the way home, basking in the gentle glow of street lamps overhead. You ate too much candy, but it’s okay.

• Julia Weber, Features Editor

“The Moon” by The Microphones

“The Moon” makes it hard to distinguish between the sounds outside your headphones of twigs snapping and the crunch of freshly sunburnt leaves—forced to walk the plank off a nearby branch now a mere imprint under your shoe—and Phil Elverum’s crunched colonnade of guitars. The music drags you to plant yourself under a yellowing streetlamp during a Charlie Brown head-hung-low rock-kicking ‘Good grief!’ of a night walk: kissing bugs fresh out of lips, ancient cicada hymns, bundles of autumn leaves coercing you to dive in headfirst, fireflies heating up the organ’s drone. Elverum’s voice lies hushed and sullen underneath the overgrowth of instrumentation, wisping through the air so personally and desolately it leaves you missing someone you’ve never even met. His weeping gusts of horns may be my favorite portion of music ever written: two bittersweet harmonies in a call and response of forgotten daydreams and memories raked under the footprint-stained rug. “I went out last night to forget that” hits hard; it sinks and seeps down into your deepest pores until it’s all that’s around you. It’s the tightening MasterLock closing in on your throat that refuses to budge, that’ll just go ahead and swallow the key whole. “The Moon” is your essential soundtrack for sleepwalking into the nearest funeral procession and stirring up a sleeping bag out of some newly muddied grave pits.

• Rocco Prioletti, News Editor

“Harvest Moon” by Neil Young

The harvest moon has marked the beginning of fall for hundreds of years, and since 1992, so has Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”. Music snobs and folks who simply want to dance can rejoice in the song all the same. This song uses an autumn backdrop to evoke the feeling of early sunsets, leaves falling, and the scramble to find someone to hold onto before the brutal cold arrives. Young’s soft, melancholy singing is reminiscent of both a love that exists only in memory and the love that’s in front of us. Acoustic guitar and harmonica complement Young’s folky vocals and a bouncing bassline tags along as a treat. It’s the only song I know of with a literal sweeping broom in the mix holding down the rhythm. This sound exemplifies the rustic vibe of the season and convinces your hips to move, as if you’re the one with the broom. “Harvest Moon” tells a story about dancing with the one you adore under the yellow glow of an autumn moon. What’s not to love about that?

• Dylan Thatcher, Contributor

“Hoodie Weather” by The Wonder Years 

There are few tracks as evocative of a fall feeling as “Hoodie Weather”. Listening to this song can fill you with that chill that only autumn can bring. References to simple things like the scent of snowfall in the first line or the angst among the rest of the lyrics carry a nostalgia that transports you to a much cooler, calmer season. This track as well as most of the songs off of the band’s sophomore album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing bring out a sense of longing for that coming of age and transition that moves us in the fall. Hearing Soupy, Matthew Brash and Josh Martin exchange the lines “I was born here / I’ll probably die here / Let’s go home” urge you to contemplate where you are at and how, even now, you are changing. Even the song’s title evokes the lower temperatures, the leaves falling from the trees and the kind of weather where you can wear heavier clothes but still be comfortable. With icy lyrics and instrumentation full of apprehension, this song has it all. Fall is about dying just to be reborn stronger again. It’s nice to feel this way all year round with “Hoodie Weather”.

• Joseph Turiano, Contributor 

“Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath

A lot of heavy metal’s creepy lyrics and general sound can be traced back to the haunting tones of Black Sabbath’s first album and title track. The song is the perfect example of how less can be more. The first two thirds of the track are built off echoey bass and drums and the same tritone guitar lick played over and over. Despite seeming simple, the song is still brutally heavy, especially with the one-of-a-kind tone that comes from the prosthetic fingertips of Tony Iommi. Its repetition adds to a growing sense of dread that builds through the track. This is helped by Ozzy Osbourne’s haunting vocals that sound like he’s on the edge of a panic attack. His pleas for help are absolutely bone chilling. The suspense built really pays off when the song transitions to become much more driving. I’m a big fan of songs that build and explode, and Black Sabbath is a peak example of that in a way that feels very reminiscent of classic horror movies. Metal is a fantastic genre all times of year, but especially during fall and Halloween.

• Nicholas Kobe, Staff Writer

“Witches’ Rave” by Jeff Buckley

As an avid lover of the fall season, one of my seasonal anthems is the stunning “Witches’ Rave” by Jeff Buckley. His depressing, sometimes arguably whiny music is perfect for autumn—and it’s exactly what makes him so alluring—because I find myself listening to mostly sad music this season, and I bet many others do too. This track reeks of crunchy leaves on the ground and finally being comfortable in big sweaters and jeans.  The classic Jeff Buckley tone mixed with some upbeat drums and an almost jazzy rhythm makes this a track you will find yourself revisiting often this season. The reference to witchcraft and other autumnal themes in this song rings true to that fall feeling even more. When you next find yourself walking through College Green as the leaves start to turn and the air smells crisp, consider “Witches’ Rave” because it’s guaranteed to set that fall mood just right.

• Kate Tocke, Contributor

“Sixteen Blue” by The Replacements

“Sixteen Blue” is the ultimate 80s teenage song. Like a lot of the alternative 80s music aesthetic, it speaks “fall” to me. In addition to having this autumnal 80s sheen, the song also has a late-teenage story attached to it, conjuring up images of the adolescent aches of the final years of high school. The whole album this song stems from (1984’s Let it Be) has a fall feeling, immediately clear from the grainy, nostalgia-inducing cover art. Nostalgia is the ultimate fall feeling, and of all the songs on the album—from the transgender-love anthem “Androgynous” to the gut-punching commiserating of “Unsatisfied”—the most nostalgic is “Sixteen Blue”. 

The song describes the mundane activities of teenagehood in its second verse, “Drive your ma to the bank / Tell your pa you got a date / But you’re lying / Now you’re lying on your back”, a wonderful depiction of teenage boredom. Boredom is something the song fixates on, talking about the dragging of time and spending your time just waiting. There’s a ‘staring at the ceiling of your bedroom in your parents’ house’ quality to this song that feels right out of an 80s movie. You can picture the view out of the narrator’s window: beautiful fall leaves on the trees, a yard starting to collect the fallen ones. The fall imagery in this song isn’t explicit, but it radiates the energy of the season nonetheless. Blue isn’t typically a fall color, but there are blue themes to fall, from the first time you don your blue jeans for the year, to the blue melancholia of early nightfall.

• Venus Rittenberg, Editorial Director

“Pristine” by Snail Mail

One of my favorite fall songs at the moment has to be “Pristine” by Snail Mail. Released in 2018 off her debut album Lush, this song instantly transports you into the awkwardness of being a young adult, especially as the singer laments about boring parties and painstaking crushes. With an upbeat guitar riff and Lindsey Jordan’s gritty alto, the best part comes at three minutes and 30 seconds when she screams, “If it’s not supposed to be / Then I’ll just let it be / And out of everyone / Be honest with me / Who do you change for?” You can feel Jordan’s frustration with being second-best, as well as the challenges that come with trying to get someone to like you back. If you need a song that feels like it could easily be snuck into the background of a coming-of-age film, then this is the epitome. 

• Grace Koennecke, Columns Editor and Copy Editor

“Oak & Ash & Thorn” by The Longest Johns

Over the past few years I’ve developed a strong love for sea shanties, ever since my trip to Key West in summer of 2019. While typically these songs are best for the summertime, as the leaves change and the winds get colder, there are plenty of these sea shanties—or shanty adjacent songs—that are just good folk music and perfect for the chilly fall season. “Oak & Ash & Thorn”, a song that already sounds like the name of a fall IPA some hipster in a flannel is really insistent you try, is one of them. The percussive acoustic guitars have a great groove to them and the group vocals are absolutely phenomenal, which probably isn’t surprising for a group known for sea shanties. The way the song builds is a great example of how relatively sparse acoustic instrumentation can grow into something musically powerful. Despite the inherent goofiness of sea shanties, “Oak & Ash & Thorn” is one of the group’s more lyrically serious songs. While the lyrics reference the summer, the talk of farming and other folk imagery make this song a great candidate for settling into the fall season. It’s a song that feels simultaneously lively, foreboding, and triumphant. All of these feelings meld together in a way that is hard to describe and has to be heard to fully understand. 

• Nicholas Kobe, Staff Writer

“Thank You” by Bonnie Raitt

The dulcet blues of Bonnie Raitt’s self-titled album ring in the changing of the leaves with a soft, sweet splendor that not only accepts, but embraces the coming change. “Thank You”, the most laid-back, relaxed track on the album is an exercise in gratitude, in being thankful for and enamored by the love that is ushered into Raitt’s life by her “baby.” In Raitt’s blues-y fashion, her clear voice coupled with the unhurried instrumentation of the song results in a song that is so classically autumnal. She has nowhere to be, nothing to do—she can exist freely and solely in the moment, and so can we for the duration of this song. In a season that can so often be gloomy and can bring out the melancholy in us all, “Thank You” is a much-welcomed, much-needed change of pace and change of mindset, reminding us of the depth of love in our lives, if we let it in.

• Julia Weber, Features Editor

You can listen to ACRN’s “Fall Faves” playlist here.