The magnetic fields and memories of cough syrup.

On the YouTube page for the 1994 non-hit “Strange Powers” by the Magnetic Fields, the first of 99 comments simply says, “This song will always remind me of abusing cough medicine.”

Now, it’s a fool’s game to pick one random poster’s internet comment to capture the essence of catchy, nostalgic tunes that gave rise to the term “song of the summer,” but if you put a gun to my head, I’d probably go with the cough-medicine line.

These songs come in two varieties. One is a jam that soundtracks a shit-ton of people falling in and out of love during months when we wear T-shirts and flip-flops. “You’re All I Need” by Method Man and Mary J. Blige is a solid example of this. Is it a good song? Who knows. If I understood radio payola and taste in music, I’d be more corrupt and happier than I am.

The other kind represents trite elegies to lost youth and young love. They’re cheesy as hell but since we all loved young and usually lost, they’re ultimately affecting.

The gold standard? “Summer of 69” by Bryan Adams. Now, this utter fucking lie of a song (Adams sure as shit didn’t get his six-string at no five-and-dime) — a tune twice as nice for having “69” in its title — didn’t create the template for a ditty about loving rock ’n’ roll as a teen, boning with abandon, and having friends that went on to be sellouts or dead. Bruce Springsteen got there earlier with, like, 87 percent of his recorded output for years. Some might put forth Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” but failing in your twenties — unless you’re one of those good-at-finance jerk-off types — is just living through your twenties.

A recent summer song was Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill.” It’s got a pseudo-Bruce jangly riff and lyrics about hand-rolling cigarettes at age 16 and driving country lanes. Sheeran even gilds the goddamn lily by referencing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” thus proving he saw Almost Famous at least once when he was a pre-fame sexless nerd. It’s a terrible song, “Castle,” and, like “Summer of 69,” I practically weep every time I hear it.

Both varieties of summer songs can’t be totally dismissed. (Or maybe they can, but hear me out.) They matter because our culture worships and hates youth in equal measure. They mattered when we were in the moment, when every shared beer or glance held stakes apocalyptically high, and they matter now, when disappointment is its own kind of freight.

It’s a special kind of half-true bullshit to settle on “getting old sucks” as a philosophy. Yeah, it’s a bummer to ache and die, but understanding the books you read and being kinder to your partner is not nothing. Still, knowing you might be a better human being now doesn’t detract from the weird, wistful (un)pleasure of listening to songs that made you and songs about the songs that made you. Everything dies, baby, and that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back and comes back and come back…

And if nostalgia keeps Ed Sheeran in sunscreen and streetwear, well, that’s just the sad, unfair violence of human existence. As his fellow U.K. troubadours, the members of Black Box Recorder, sang in 1998, “Life is unfair. Kill yourself or get over it.”

“Strange Powers” was few people’s idea of a summer jam. Yes, it’s a small-scale synth masterpiece, and it opens with the same lost-innocence signifiers of Ferris wheels and Coney Island that made both Springsteen and Gaslight Anthem rich (in the latter’s case, temporarily). But songwriter Stephin Merritt immediately undercuts the warm-weather reverie with the words “under more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand.”

Delivered in Merritt’s signature deadpan, the song starts sad and ends that way, making clear that the object of affection doesn’t come around anymore. That said, the key lyric is When we kiss, it’s like flying saucers landing — a line so romantic it jars the senses.

“Strange Powers” didn’t chart and isn’t even the best-known song on the album, titled Holiday. But it hit the small town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I was being as 19 years old as one can possibly be, like a full-size house built of mixtapes collapsing.

Great Barrington — today a place for wealthy New Yorkers to vacation and buy art for their walls — was almost already that in 1994. Rich tourists bought overpriced artisanal sandwiches and gave spare change to the junkies on Railroad Street. It was boho to be sure, but it was also a rare place where college kids, aimless former college kids, and townies who manned the pizza ovens and marijuana dealerships got along decently, sharing whiskey, Robitussin, and bodily fluids. We didn’t care about sports, top 40, or good health. We bonded over Bob Dylan, the Wu-Tang Clan (it was ’94 — we weren’t idiots), and whatever esoteric sounds trickled into town from our betters at bigger, weirder colleges.

Sometimes it was obscure soul. Often it was indie rock that might have been mainstream in bigger cities, but felt like secrets shared to us wastoids. (At least that’s what I recall; maybe I’m romanticizing.) I went on Facebook to ask for people’s memory of this summer when “Strange Powers” hit so hard. Most people were like, “Dude, I was listening to Hole.”

I didn’t even put the song on mixtapes myself. I just remember everyone else doing it. Oh, newsflash — it turns out Holiday dropped in September, so I guess it was the song of, I don’t know, apple-picking season? The song of Indian summer? Also, I learned it was just one girl who made us all mixtapes with “Strange Powers” on it. But it remains true that all I remember from that time is that song, and a lot of the people I remember loving it are now bankers or dead, like the girl who made us the mixtapes. (R.I.P.)

True believers don’t fact-check “Born to Run.” They don’t care that Bryan Adams was ten years old in 1969. True believers misremember wildly, while focusing on bigger truths — we were all in love and time doesn’t care. Even if you don’t know all the lyrics, you can still sing that song.