Better Than Ezra / Deluxe / 1993
This Time of Year
wistful, hazy, bittersweet
A loose, impressionistic song about the mood that settles in during a particular season, built almost entirely around sensory fragments rather than a plot. It's less a story than an attempt to name a feeling that resists being named, leaning on repetition and vague nostalgia to do the emotional work.
seasonal nostalgia ambiguous longing memory and youth acceptance of change atmosphere over narrative
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator speaking to an unnamed 'you,' possibly a former partner or simply the listener, describing a shared seasonal feeling rather than addressing a specific event; the voice is observational and a little passive, more interested in naming a mood than resolving anything.
What happens
The song doesn't progress through events so much as circle a single sensation. It opens with an abstract claim about something in the air, moves into scattered images of adolescence (football games, first cars, young romance), and keeps returning to the idea that this feeling recurs predictably every year. There's a gesture toward change and reckoning with good and bad memories, but the song never resolves into a clear decision or story -- it ends still repeating the same phrase about feeling it in the air.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form with near-identical verses that reuse the same images and phrasing, separated by a chorus that insists on inevitability and repetition. The bridge-like tag of 'this time of year' gets appended to chorus lines on later repeats, intensifying the sense of ritual. The song closes by stripping down to just the central phrase repeated like a mantra, which suggests the feeling itself, not any narrative payoff, is the point.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song starts with an abstract sensory claim, comparing an undefined feeling to the ordinary pleasure of a weekend afternoon. This sets the tone of impermanence right away, admitting the feeling doesn't last long even as it's being described.}
First chorus
“Well I know there's a reason to change”
The chorus pivots briefly toward introspection, suggesting personal growth or resolution, but it's undercut almost immediately by the acknowledgment that good and bad memories simply coexist rather than get resolved.
Second verse
Images shift to adolescent markers -- sports, cars, early romance -- which ground the otherwise abstract mood in nostalgia for youth specifically tied to a season, likely autumn given the football and leaf imagery, without ever confirming which season explicitly.
Final repetitions
“Feel it in the air”
By the end the lyric abandons narrative content almost entirely, reducing itself to variations on a single phrase. This formal choice mirrors the song's theme: the feeling can't be explained, only repeated and felt.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated structural phrase about a feeling in the air opens multiple sections, reinforcing the song's circular, non-narrative logic.
- synecdoche/imagery
- Concrete seasonal images like a football field or a first car stand in for a broader adolescent nostalgia without the song spelling out any specific memory.
- refrain
- The phrase marking the time of year recurs so often it becomes less a lyric than a rhythmic anchor, mimicking how seasonal feelings return involuntarily.
- vagueness as device
- The deliberate lack of specificity about what 'the feeling' actually is forces the listener to supply their own associations, making the song function as a mood piece rather than a story.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on how certain times of year trigger involuntary nostalgia, where specific memories (first cars, youthful romance, football season) are less important than the recurring emotional echo they produce annually. A secondary reading could frame this as a breakup song disguised as a seasonal one, with 'this time of year' marking an anniversary of a relationship's end -- the references to change, living with the bad, and a vague 'you' could support this -- but the song is deliberately unspecific enough that both readings coexist without contradiction.
Context
Better Than Ezra emerged from the early-90s alternative rock scene, with their breakout major-label success coming slightly after this earlier material. This song appears on an earlier release before their biggest commercial hits, and reflects a more straightforward jangly alt-rock sensibility typical of the era, prioritizing mood and hooks over complex lyrical narrative.
Listen for
- How the instrumentation likely swells underneath the repeated 'feel it in the air' lines to compensate for the sparse lyrical content
- The way the bridge-like tag phrase gets stacked onto chorus lines in later repetitions, thickening the sense of inevitability
- Contrast between the concrete adolescent imagery in the verses and the abstract emotional language in the choruses
- The stripped-down outro, which abandons narrative entirely in favor of pure repetition
About Better Than Ezra
Better Than Ezra is an American alternative rock band based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and signed with Round Hill Music. The band formed in 1988 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and consists of Kevin Griffin, Tom Drummond, Michael Jerome (drums), and James Arthur Payne Jr..
1988 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue