I started off just remembering summers. "Were we really there?"; "Was it real?"; Sometimes for a lot of people your memories, particularly childhood memories, seem so golden and you think "did it really never rain all summer or am I just imagining the sunny bits? And then the phrase, "you tell me," began to be the theme of the song. I wrote it out in Long Island, during one of those summers. I was just looking at red cardinal. For someone English it's magical, seeing a bright red bird coming out of a tree, so he appeared in the lyric. A lot of it was actually just there as I was writing. It became a tribute to golden summers.