Spring Into Summer - Intellectual

On the Zach Sang Show, Lizzy referenced a relationship that she’s written most of her songs about. The two were on-again-off-again long term, which is likely what this lyric is referring to; they have too much history to ever fully get over each other.

McAlpine employs seasonal imagery to capture the passage of time and emotional transitions. “Spring into summer” evokes a sense of natural progression, a time associated with renewal, warmth and emotional growth. These seasons often symbolise new beginnings and the flourishing of relationships. However, the quiet acknowledgement that “winter’s gone” introduces a contrasting tone.

While summer and spring suggest vibrancy and connection, the departure of winter subtly hints at loss or detachment. In a way, McAlpine is suggesting that time moves forward with ease, even when the heart cannot.

This seems to be a reference to her 2022 SoundCloud demo “physics or fate”:

‘Cause even if it’s not now
I will end up here somehow
It’s physics or it’s fate and I can’t stop it
I always come back to this

Lizzy wrote these songs 2 years apart, which proves her point, that she’s never going to stop being drawn to him.

“Summer is falling” not only indicates that summer is coming to an end, Lizzy also uses subtle word play to indicate that summer is turning into fall. This continues the passage of the seasons that occurs through the song, first “spring into summer”, now “summer is falling”.

In this lyric, Lizzy uses the current of a river (or some similar body of water) as a metaphor to represent life moving more quickly than she wants it to.

She has expressed this same feeling in her song “All Falls Down,” where she says:

I can’t stop the time from moving, and I can never get it back

In addition, water was brought up in another track from the album, “March”:

Threw a rock into the water
Watched it sink down to the bottom

Can tie back to her song Vortex, when she sings, “Someday you’ll come back, and I’ll say no.”

This could be a reference to Simon & Garfunkel song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.

The water represents how she is slowly losing parts of herself, and once engulfed, she will have completely lost herself due to this exhausting toxic relationship with the person she loves. This metaphor is similar to the opening lyrics of “March”:

Threw a rock into the water
Watched it sink down to the bottom
Tryna find a lesson in it all, but
I haven’t learned anything

The lesson she attempts at finding in “March” is revealed through the metaphor in these words from “Spring Into Summer” – Lizzy is the rock and the water is the weight of this relationship.

In the chorus, Lizzy mentions jumping off a bridge into water, which suggests that she is no longer in the shallow end; she will have fully lost herself at this point. That relates to this lyric’s metaphor as she is willingly allowing herself to be chipped away at to stay with the one she loves.

Interestingly, the album cover of the non-deluxe edition of Older depicts Lizzy in a somewhat shallow body of water:

Older’s animated album cover as shown on Apple Music

In contradiction to her song Broken Glass, where she sings, “I know you’ve been hurt. But you did it first to me”

In Broken Glass, it’s as if she’s justifying her actions, saying she did it in response to what was done to her, but in this song, she admits she’s the one who was the perpetrator.

Also, despite her constant confusion on whether she wants them to leave or not, she wishes she wouldn’t have let them go. She understands that she had a good thing, and regrets ruining it. This is different from her other songs, where here she has made up her mind on whether she wants them to stay or go, though this might just be because he left and now she misses what she doesn’t have

“Summer is falling, it’s a distant dream” is a reversal of the earlier lyrics in the song. The once hopeful metaphor of summer has now become a lost ideal. By calling it a “distant dream”, McAlpine positions emotional fulfillment as something that once felt real but now exists only in memory or imagination.

A lot of her songs are about trying to love her partner beyond her capability. We see this in her song, Better Than This, where she sings, “Someone will love you better than this.”

She wants to love her partner the way they need, but she acknowledges that she is incapable. Even so, she doesn’t leave.