Autumn in Boston is a season made to be romanticized. It holds the kind of beauty you don’t just see — but breathe in. It feels like the city itself is drawing you in, slowing you down to notice how time itself seems to soften.
Usually, when I describe things, I like to draft my thoughts by referencing the beauty in something and attributing it to something unreal. In movies, we create something artificial because there is simply nothing out there that can compare to what we pictured originally.
But there is something about autumn that makes it feel as if every feeling and experience is real — or at least feels real.
To me, autumn is the smell of old books and the tiny key to the drawer where I keep my journal. It’s the necklace I pull at when I’m nervous, the freshly brewed cup of coffee warming my hands and my grandmother’s knitted scarf wrapped tightly around my neck. It’s trench coats and boots, the color maroon and watching the cozy fall classic, “Gilmore Girls.”
Most importantly, it’s music. So these are my top three songs that capture the essence of everything that’s beautiful about autumn in Boston.
The first song, “There She Goes” by The La’s, is — quite simply — the perfect soundtrack for a walk down Comm Ave.
There is a certain ritual to it: You close your eyes for a brief moment and feel the autumn breeze touch your lips as you murmur the lyrics quietly. You slightly reposition your purse, and let the confident cadence of your boots fall in step with the guitar’s strum.
The refrain itself, “there she goes,” repeated almost hypnotically, feels less like a lyric than a mantra, urging you forward. It’s a reminder that what you’ve long desired may not be too far away now.
The lyrics, “pulsing through my veins” and “this feeling that remains,” articulate that untold rush of vitality, the sense of something quickening within you. The song carries a mild 90s shimmer — at once nostalgic and timeless.
Furthermore, its placement in “Gilmore Girls” remains, to my mind, one of the most perfect combinations of music and film.
At the same time, this season carries its own undercurrent of angst and yearning that drifts through the crisp autumn air.
“Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star encapsulates this feeling with a haunting, delicate grace. Each note evokes a presence long past: a laugh, a glance and a fleeting warmth that drifts through memory like leaves carried on the wind.
The song’s subtle tonal shifts and gradual build resonate deeply, pairing effortlessly with the scent of pumpkin spice or the glow of autumn candles. Its musicality reaches into the depths of the subconscious — a love confessed yet deliberately elusive, perfectly mirroring the delicate, brooding stillness of mid-October.
In its indie melancholy, “Fade Into You” allows you to slow down, to dwell in a sense of quiet incompleteness and to experience the peculiar beauty of longing.
Autumn isn’t just bright or dark — it’s tinted, almost as if it’s fading and collapsing with time. It comes right after the warmth and just before the cold — the in-between where most reflections of memories invite and thrive, even if only temporarily.
When it’s warm out, you tend to recall happy moments because our bodies release more serotonin and dopamine — but the window of that sense of nostalgia is small. It occurs within a few seconds of your smile shrinking once you finish thinking of something fond.
It turns into thinking of what you lost, and that sense of hurt builds till you experience anger, eventually leaving you empty as winter approaches.
Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” fits every narrative like this. The piano and delicate guitar mirror the rise and fall of emotion, while Swift’s voice moves from soft reflection to impassioned release. It lets you savor the past, feel resentment and nostalgia and dwell in that fragile, perfect in-between that only autumn can hold.
And so, who’s to say you can’t romanticize sadness? I mean, it’s not illegal — is it?
Most of us, as young adults going through various emotionally intense situations, at some point may have romanticized the persona of the sad autumn girl. It’s true — there is beauty in that, too, in that quiet existence and that longing for something more out of life.
At least, that’s what I feel every time I’m walking down BU’s Comm Ave. and an autumn leaf just happens to flutter past me. In that moment, I become the main character in my favorite Jane Austen novel, carried along not by dialogue on a page but by lyrics that feel like they were written just for me.