1983 Hit Was 10 Years in the Making and Came Together at 3am in One Sitting
Many fans hear "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels as a perfect nostalgic snapshot of summer's end. However, it might surprise you to know that lead singer-songwriter Martha Davis, 75, spent almost a decade living with that feeling before she finally wrote the song.
The Motels were a new wave band out of L.A. in the early 1980s. Their third album All Four One (1982) was released right into the early days of MTV. That year, Davis, then 31, won the "Best Performance in a Music Video" award at the American Music Awards for her performance in the "Only the Lonely" video. The Motels quickly released a fourth album Little Robbers (1983), and its first single "Suddenly Last Summer" hit No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Related: 1984 Power Anthem Became One of the Most Adrenaline-Fueled Songs of the '80s
As Davis has shared across several interviews, "Suddenly Last Summer" came together slowly. She clocks the song's first spark back to one sunny day in her Berkeley backyard during the early '70s. Davis was going through a particularly trying time. Both her parents had died-her mom by suicide and her dad from illness-and she was young, single mom raising two daughters. When a sudden crisp wind kicked up followed by the music from the ice cream truck, she felt that twinge of melancholy. It was a knowing-that summer, like many things, will come to an end, and change will come.
"You know, things change that you can never bring back," Davis shared in an interview with The Rumpus.
About ten years later in L.A., the song finally came together in an early-morning burst: "Three o'clock in the morning I am awakened by [sings melody], it woke me up, and the song came out."
"All of the pieces that I had experienced ten years earlier in Berkeley were just manifesting themselves," she explained to American Songwriter. "I've never had that happen before or since. It just goes to show that all of the song fodder is these experiences in your life, stowed away in memory nooks and various places, and they decide at the time they will make themselves imminent."
In addition to hitting No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, "Suddenly Last Summer" topped the Billboard Rock Top Tracks chart.
More recently, despite the song's very specific, bittersweet feeling of summer ending, it's ranked No. 7 on Billboard's "Top 30 Summer Songs." It's also included on uDiscover Music's "Best Summer Songs Ever" and Ultimate Classic Rock's "Rock's 40 Best Summer Songs." And to date, the song has 13 million streams on the Spotify streaming service.
Ten years of a feeling, one sleepless night, and a melody that arrived in its own time-that's "Suddenly Last Summer."
Watch music video for "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels:
Listen to "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels:
Check out the 2002 remastered version of "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels:
Copyright 2026 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This story was originally published June 3, 2026 at 2:12 PM.