“I wrote Summer’s Hard for Love years ago, just after I got divorced and entered the dating scene for the first time. It’s a sweet longing song. I edited it quite a bit to create this 2021 version, and I love the vulnerability it’s maintained,” says Jonas.
Karen Jonas, like many other songstresses of the past and present, delves comfortably into a cozy 70’s singer-songwriter mold that is affectingly intimate. On August 20th, Jonas will release Summer Songs, a new four-song EP along with Gumballs, a book of original poetry. “Over the course of a raw week in January, I wrote frantically. I didn’t worry about what my kids or my mother or you would think, I just wrote. When I amassed over 60 poems, vignettes of hard scenes from my life, I realized I had written a book, covering everything from divorce to religion to dating to spiders,” Jonas recalls. Writing this vastly personal autobiographical collection of poems allowed her to find a more vulnerable place to embrace these gems from her old songwriting notebooks.
“I began to hear flashes of these songs as I was writing my poetry collection, songs I started writing years ago. I reconnected with them and spent a lot of time reprocessing and editing,” she adds. “I was able to update them to my current songwriting sensibilities while maintaining the sweet vulnerability of the inspiration for these summer-themed tunes.” The result is Summer Songs, three heartfelt originals and a show-stopping cover of Don Henley classic “The Boys of Summer.”
Glide is premiering “Summer Hard For Love,” (below) a rainy day whirl of jazzy melodies and crafty songwriting. Jonas sings with a warm vibrato that makes like a mix between Lana Del Rey and Cowboy Junkies, evolving into an unforeseen summer go-to song.