The May long weekend is Canada’s escape. Three—in some cases, four—days, one of which is a stat holiday, generally nice weather, newly-opened campgrounds, fireworks and the promise of the impending summer. Blue skies taper down to the green grass you didn’t realize existed until this weekend, interrupted by the leaves that you didn’t know the trees had sprouted. Suddenly, the year turns around again, feels right.

This year was the first year I fully appreciated this. I recognized the potential in this escape and saw the excitement that this summer will hold. And, in true music nerd fashion, I began immediately working on a mix CD to capture this. I needed this to be extra summery, too, because I was sharing it with People I Like, and I didn’t want to alienate them.

It takes an extra kind of spark for a song to universally capture summer, however. Music is evocative of moods, surely, but a song that everyone can slide their sunroof back to and let the breeze cut currents around their fingertips, that’s tough. And what’s even tougher is the fact that it has to be either brand-new, sparkling and untouched and full of a virgin excitement, or it has to be familiar as Kool-Aid in your backyard, as warm and close to your heart as your first bike ride with your parents.

If it isn’t the loving ghost of summer yet to be, the song must be the ghost of those past, welcoming you into a memorial embrace. And that, of course, is the essence of May Long: past and future coming only as fleeting spectres, warming the present instead of cooling it, getting you re-energized for that one last sprint through what remains of spring.

“Major Label Debut (Fast),” off of Broken Social Scene’s EP To Be You And Me, the limited edition disc packaged with last year’s self-titled record, is an example of this flighty, energized feeling. Where the normal version of it is slow, beatless, and melancholy, the fast version is exuberant, full of summer-dance drums, exuberant shouting, and giddy smiles. If anything captures the feeling of elementary-school summer freedom, it’s the way that Broken Social Scene packs their joy into this song, making it both dizzyingly expansive and strongly focused simultaneously. Their summer is one where you’re determined to do something big - you don’t know what, but you know you’re going to do it.

A song lost in the enormity of it all is Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” Cee-Lo Green’s plaintive tale of mental illness has already been the topic of many a blog; however, its hip-hop beat belies the fact that it’s an old song. My mother used to croon gorgeous old soul songs to me before I went to bed, and they remind me of a time when I had nothing to worry about, nothing planned except the next day, which would undoubtedly involve a Slurpee. Of course, to extract it from that beat is to slice it away from what freshens it, namely some prime Danger Mouse, huge and strutting. It’s the confidence of a well-built teenager stalking the beach, looking for some play/prey. Its contrast with the desperate vocals and shuddering chorus is as disparate as the divide between the sky and a quickly-moving countryside.

And as much as they’re remembered for “One Week,” The Barenaked Ladies’ “Falling for the First Time” is a song that basically sounds like cannonballs into a pool, like one of the spinning rides at the travelling fair, and like running outside to catch the Dickie-Dee guy’s bike. In Canada, at least, it’s a pop song as familiar and homey as a Mountie holding a beaver while standing in front of the CN Tower. What’s even better, though, is that it’s warm, a close friend and a charge into the future, big and bright. What better, then, to soundtrack a weekend that basically represents that charge, that last buildup before the year splinters, shatters and explodes into hundreds of different directions?

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