The Dead of Winter

A song for the many types of winters we're all going through

Hi, it’s zero degrees outside. It’s mid-February. And Punxsutawny Phil’s stupid shadow recently indicated that we’re in for many more weeks of this than we’d hoped. 

It’s the dead of winter, friends. 

And it’s not just the dead of actual winter; we’re still trapped in this pandemic, with no real end in sight. It’s the proverbial dead of another sort of “winter.” On top of that, people are just...dealing with a lot right now. Maybe you’re in the “dead” of a bad job, or a soured relationship, or maybe you’re just listless and feeling stuck and drained from...well, from everything. 

So I wrote this:

Lyrics 

Hope to see you in Kansas City. Maybe when all of this is over. But for now Union Station’s empty like an echo...

Think you'll ever make it to Kansas City? Do you think she'll ever decide? Or in the dead of winter will you die inside?

What about all the missing persons? The ones who will never see the thaw. Will we remember who they are?

I admit to cabin fever. You bet the walls are closing in. It’s sad when home is not a palace, but a prison.

I’m afraid of what we’ll find when the thaw comes in its time. When did your children get so tall? Tell them we miss them, one and all...

If you don't make it to Kansas City, and I have to have that drink alone. I'll raise a glass. I'll raise a glass. I'll raise a glass to the dead of winter’s own.

I wrote this sort of as if it was a letter to a loved one. In the early verses, I tried to evoke this feeling of wanting to connect and be together, to at least meet up somewhere soon, but...well. Who knows when that will be possible again. 

And I used the imagery of a place like a Union Station in Kansas City, which is typically busy and bustling and is also a place where travelers meet, but right now is completely empty (or at least, in my imagination it is). I’m calling out how unnerving it is to see these places and spaces devoid of the people who usually give them life. I think it’s because a space that is meant for people, but doesn’t have any people, is dead in a way. 

The second line is really about those personal “winters”...when we’re in limbo or stuck or drained or hopeless or whatever. The frustration and lack of control. The waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting…

One of the things about this pandemic is that we’re losing so many people. They’ve become missing persons. Partly of course it’s COVID-19, which has taken almost half a million lives in the U.S. alone. But we’ve all been hunkering down for nearly an entire year, and in that time, people have died from other things—accidents and old age and other illnesses. And people have moved out of their communities, for normal reasons, but also because of job losses or new opportunities or what have you. 

And all those people are just...gone. We can’t have going-away parties. We can’t really even have funerals. We’ve lost all the rituals of saying goodbye to people. We don’t notice when they aren’t at school, or church, or community events, or the grocery store, because none of us are at those places anymore. 

When you lose those rituals and can’t feel the absence of specific people from your normal daily life, you don’t mark their departure. And you don’t remember. When we re-emerge from all this--the proverbial and literal thaw I mention in the song—I’m worried we won’t remember who we’ve lost. 

My grandmother is one of those people. She died in December, of complications from COVID-19, and although we did a Zoom memorial with our immediate family, it’s just...it’s just not the same. At a real funeral for her, we’d see far-flung cousins and aunts and uncles, and there would be a dinner where we’d laugh a lot and be grateful to see one another despite the circumstances, and there would be a hundred random people I don’t know who would pull me aside and tell me how much she meant to them. People like her hairdresser, or some clerk at a store who saw her every week, or a neighbor from way back, or whoever. That’s how we remember people who have gone.

One thing that did not stop during this endless lockdown is the growth of children. Any time people we haven’t seen for too long see our kids, their jaws drop. “Oh my gosh, they got so tall!,” they remark. I’ve felt the same way seeing other people’s kids. It’s sort of a loss, isn’t it? We’re missing out on something there. In schools and communities, we raise our kids together. For almost a year how...we haven’t. The same goes for extended family; how many of us finally get a chance to see nieces and nephews and grandchildren and...God, they got so tall. What else did I miss while that was happening? 

So. I tried to capture that loss and longing, and that anxious stillness, and the little needles of despair that come with being in the dead of (several types of) winter. But hey, at least you’re not alone in feeling this way, right? Does that bring you a touch of comfort and connection? I hope so. It does for me.

For the music nerds

This is one of those songs that began life as a little riff—a simple two-chord progression on the piano. C to Em and back again. Nothing notable or unique. It just kind of rang right in my ears. From there I noodled around to try and find some chordal movement and harmonic structure that complemented the mood I was going for: Am, Am7, B°, back to Am7, land on Dm7. The topmost voice in the right hand climbs up while the left-hand bass walks down step-wise, creating different chord inversions along the way. 

Then a pause on that Dm7 (F - A - C in the right hand with big fat octave Ds in the left), and a resolution with a transition as I hit a G in the left hand while walking down scale-wise to get back to where I started. That was the sort of harmonic thesis of the song, and I built on it from there.

The tone and mood told me this was going to be morose. It was born as a winter song, and the idea of the dead of winter showed up pretty quickly. 

Although I wrote most of “The Dead of Winter” on piano, and always intended to use piano as the main instrument when I recorded it, I ended up doing it on the guitar kind of by accident. I wanted to experiment with some vocal ideas, and it was late at night. I can get away with playing guitar in my office without waking everyone up, but not banging on the piano in the living room. 

So I laid down the guitar track and did a quick scratch vocal track. Then I started playing with more vocal accompaniment—that “hah-hah-hah-hah” stuff, in two- and three-part harmony.

Astute listeners will note that the “hah-hah-hah-hah” vocal bits are reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” That is because I unabashedly stole the idea directly from that song. 

I’ve long felt that the “hah-hah-hah-hah” perfectly illustrates the ironic combination of stillness and anxiety that comes with living in the dead of winter. Her voice in “O Superman” is gentle, almost soft, with a calm tone. Yet those pops of air are energetic (try it yourself: hah-hah-hah-hah), and their rapid, unceasing repetition creates this sort of nervous urgency. It’s at once a drone (calming) and an ostinato (agitating). And it’s exactly the effect I wanted for this song.

I was happy with how the vocal harmony was working, but with that and the guitar and lead vocal tracks down, the recording was definitely missing something. It needed a lead instrument or voice. I’d had a lick in the back of my head for some time, and I tried it out on an electric guitar. It worked. Sweet. 

This lead lick always felt wistful to me, almost like it’s an aural nod to the thoughts of this main character in the song. And I really wanted a sound that contrasted with the rest of what I had in there. So I plugged the electric directly into my recording box (I usually record by playing the electric guitar through an amp and recording that with a mic) to get a pure and simple tone from the guitar, and then I slathered it with an obscene amount of reverb. I think the effect works: It almost doesn’t belong in the song, which was kind of the point--it’s off on its own, a sort of descant that’s lost in thought while we feel the jittery hah-hah-hah-hah of the backing vocals. 

So! A song for winter—this particular winter, and the other winters we’re all currently going through. Hope to see you all in a literal or figurative Kansas City soon.