(Part three of a four part series that took a year off. Read parts one and two.)
Winter has such a singular essence, which made creating this list both difficult and simple. Difficult in that there were fewer songs to choose from to fully exemplify the feeling of winter being expressed through music, but much easier in distinguishing whether a song did contain those elusive qualities.
I discovered, in my compiling and obsessive listening and re-listening to these songs, that all of the limited aspects of songs that express the quintessence of the season could be distilled simply to the opening line of one of the entries: Wilco’s “Via Chicago”.
I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt all right to me.
So put on a sweater and let the frigid air chill your eardrums as we perform an autopsy on winter and deconstruct that line.
“I dreamed…”
Last year, after the infamous “Snowmageddon” that brought half the nation to a stand-still, I stepped outside to dig through the nearly two feet of snow that had fallen, and looked out upon a surreal scene, a seeming alien dreamscape that was vaguely familiar as the world I’d once known, but undeniably foreign. It’s the same reaction I have after any snowfall, but it was magnified a bit this year. These are songs that capture that dreamlike and hallucinatory state one can find themselves lost in wandering through a cold and surreal winter landscape.
There are other songs on this list that more obviously evoke the essence of winter, but I love how the Great Lake Swimmers’ love song captures a moment so perfectly. When everything around you has fallen silent, the small and beautiful details of life before you crystallize and become more clear amidst the noise. The gentle sway and plinking of banjo and guitar lend a cold and removed feeling, but the whispered lyrics breathe a warmth onto the proceedings like hot air against a cold window.
There is no band quite like Sigur Rós, molding ambient soundscapes that are impossible not to get lost in, with only lead singer Jonsi’s vocals, sung in his alien Icelandic tongue, to guide you through to the other side. Honestly, any song of theirs would work on this list, always building slowly to a pounding intensity, sending the listener reeling into an intense fever dream that is even more alien and foreign than our snow-covered one.
The National – “Mistaken for Strangers”
Winter has always struck me as a season that can only be fully experienced in an urban setting. The city is already cold, hard and dead, with a skeleton of concrete, steal and glass, but always active, alive and bustling, glowing with lights at all hours. All of this oxymoronic juxtaposition serves to more fully underscore the feeling of disconnect and remove I feel with the winter. The driving rhythms of this song off of The National’s 2007 masterpiece-of-an-album Boxer (more on that album later) perfectly echo that feeling of people undeterred by the cold, moving about their lives. The essence of those lives, though, are as hollow and empty as the city they move through, a steady and relentless fall from grace. “You wouldn’t want an angel watching over/Surprise, surprise: they wouldn’t want to watch.”
“…about killing you again last night…”
Winter, at its core, is dying: trees shed their leaves, the temperature falls, and that which was once living and vibrant lays cold and still. But then, months into the gray and inert season, snow, pure and pristine, blankets the world. It’s like a ghost, the snow echoing the life that once made these bones dance, but still insubstantial and fleeting, haunting us with the vibrancy what once was. These are the songs that keep winter haunting me all year long.
Wilco – “Via Chicago”
I was divided as to where to place this song. It’s slow, trance-like rhythm and hypnotic, layered vocals, not to mention its illusory lyrics, seem to put it in the above “dream” category, but there are a few things that drove me to have it transition into the group of songs about death and dying. Lead singer Jeff Tweedy’s voice starts out simple and organic, but as layers of production fall down upon the song like tiers of snow, he becomes a ghost haunting a song that can barely keep its composure. It’s a song about a dream of death, but the song itself seems to be decomposing right before our ears, as instruments, and even the rhythm, drift in and out of the song, everything coming apart at the seems. Its a song whose core is rotting away, even as it lulls us into a sleep we’ll never wake from.
Antony & the Johnsons – “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Dylan’s classic is one of the more obvious songs about death, but his aesthetic is clearly more autumnal. This cover by Antony & the Johnsons, from the I Am There soundtrack, is much more fitting. Antony’s quivering tenor and the more subdued and sparse arrangement create a much more funereal atmosphere. Instead of coming from a deathbed, this version feels as if it’s sung at a graveside.
The Antlers – “Shiva”
Just the song’s title, layered in meanings, is elegiac enough to earn it a spot on this list. “Shiva” is the Hindu got of death and destruction. “Shiva” is also the Hebrew term for the seven days that one is to spend shut off from the world, in mourning after the death of a loved one. With its hospital imagery, ambient sounds and backing vocals like howling winds (or are they ghosts?) it is calming and accepting of the death at its center, a musical rendering of a soul escaping its bodily husk and shuffling off this mortal coil.
“…and it felt all right to me.”
The Antlers – “Bear”
The National – “Apartment Story”
Though these songs, on the surface, seem to be incredibly different, with the former song (I can’t stress enough how insanely great the 2009 album Hospice is) evoking images of a cancerous ursine abortion, and the latter being a more exact representation of snowed-in winter days. Still, both have a dancing away the darkness feeling, where we drink and play meaningless games and do whatever we can do distract us from the misery that infiltrates our lives, whether its disasters in our lives or that the world has temporarily decided to die around us. Psychologically, that’s the same purpose that all of the winter holidays serve. It’s no accident that almost every holiday about family togetherness takes place in the deadest of the seasons. Either way, we barricade the outside world and fill our time with trivialities, drinking a bit too much and smiling a bit too hard, though we still “know we’re fucked, and not getting unfucked soon.”
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