The placement of “Remember Summer Days” changes what an album can remember.
An album does not necessarily keep the same ending forever. If Anri’s Timely!! continues past “GOOD-NIGHT FOR YOU” into “Remember Summer Days,” the sequence has been expanded. A song named for remembering arrives after a farewell. That small fact creates an intriguing echo, making a farewell a little more permeable to another beginning. A later edition can create a listening experience that did not yet exist when the album first appeared.
The song itself was not newly made for that expansion. Anri’s official discography lists it on the “Kanashimi ga Tomaranai” single released on November 5, 1983. Release documentation credits Toshiki Kadomatsu with words, music, and arrangement. The 2008 Timely!! CD includes it as a bonus track. These facts separate a work’s age from the place where we encounter it. It belongs to the album’s period without therefore belonging to the original album sequence.
B-side, bonus track, compilation: these terms can sound like a ranking of importance, though they often describe relationships of packaging. A position may be peripheral without an experience being secondary. A listener selecting a standalone track need not inherit the hierarchy of a two-sided record. Nor is an expanded edition simply a matter of fitting more material into a larger container. It changes adjacencies. It changes whether a goodbye is followed by another page, and potentially changes how an album is remembered.
The title’s word “remember” acquires an accidental second job. Besides pointing toward summer, it can prompt a look back at the edition itself. Do we remember a record as it appeared in a particular year, or the relationship we subsequently formed with it? This need not become an examination in specialist knowledge. Identifying what we are hearing gives a feeling more specificity, rather than greater permission to exist.
The song can consequently inhabit several times at once: its 1983 single placement, its position in the 2008 expanded sequence, and the moment somebody presses play today. They are connected without being compressed into one date. When summer returns as track eleven, history has not literally reversed. A medium capable of being rearranged has allowed a later listener to approach the past in a different order.