The blurriness of “Parking Lot,” by Anderson .Paak, is why it suits the hot months so well. Illustration by André da Loba

My favorite song on “Malibu,” the recent album by Anderson .Paak, an unclassifiable singer-songwriter-rapper-instrumentalist from Oxnard, California, is its eighth track, “Parking Lot,” which begins with a synth-blown minor chord like something from a dream world. The chord vibrates toward climax, then yields to a few pinpricks of guitar and an easy interplay of cymbals and handclaps. The drum-and-clap routine, together with a bass line that arrives nimbly on its heels, makes the song weirdly (and, for me, irresistibly) danceable, but it’s the only aspect of the song that can really be called precise—everything else hovers just below meaning, or just short of arrival.

Take .Paak’s opening words: “You told me your whole life story in a few shorts / All the while, I never know the tone of your voice / A half an hour, I ramble on way too much / Alone with my own thoughts.” The narrator has a pocket of time in mind, but the particulars are fuzzy, held together only by the reminiscent, retreating sound of the track (which .Paak co-produced) and by the occasional wistful note in his otherwise incomprehensible lyrics. “Bring the corners from left to right,” he goes on. “How many more will it take to get a crossfade? / Coming closer to midnight / And I’m wide awake—and ain’t you afraid to fade?”

Behind this blurriness lies what I love about “Parking Lot,” and why it suits the hot months so well. (As does, by the way, the rest of “Malibu.” In retrospect, its January release date was a bit of a shame.) Summer, for me, so often becomes a kind of summary—it’s the season I most easily, and most happily, forget. When I try to remember what it was, exactly, that I loved about a particular July, what arrives is a series of surprisingly vivid impressions, distorted by time—or, as .Paak says, by a “combination of all my life’s complaints and a few strong drinks.”

Here’s most of what I remember about some summers I’ve lived through: at seven or so, I went to Disney World and sobbed at the sight of a life-size Ninja Turtle. Between eighth and ninth grades, I went to camp in New Hampshire, listened to DMX’s “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot” every day, and learned to canoe in white water. The next year, at the same camp, I ate the sweetest orange I’ve ever tasted, and then, on a wooden bench near an outdoor basketball court, took an uninterrupted, daylong nap. Another year, later on, I sat around with my stomach hurting, waiting for my kid to be born. Five years ago, maybe, I went to a music festival in the desert—my first and last—and sat on a hill one night, trying and failing to understand a set by Animal Collective, and watching a neon Ferris wheel—was it a Ferris wheel?—as it spun.

As for this summer, well, let’s hope that none of us have to recall it too well. The Republican primary electorate dropped the ball, giving us a shouty real-estate faker to listen to for months, but, if all goes well, we might find ourselves, five or ten years on, sounding like .Paak—remembering the general tone of things but not the words.

“I don’t remember the parking lot,” .Paak sings, exhilarated and confused. “I just remember the song we sang.”