Winter Songs, #4

Not only does “White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes remind me of winter, it is about winter; or at the very least, it involves a memory that takes place in winter.

I listened to this song, and the album it is on, very frequently during the first winter I spent in Erie (a very unique time for me, here are lots of entries about it).  This song will always evoke, in my mind, the images, smells, and feel of driving the pot-hole filled Erie streets in the dead of winter, with ice and snow filling my wheel wells, and a particular afternoon where I drove to a cemetery which sidles a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, and while this song played in the background, I looked out over the vast, frozen lake, and felt sorrow as well as joy.

The song’s simple lyrics go thusly:

“I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied round their throats
to keep their little heads
from falling in the snow,
and I turned round and there you go!
And, Michael, you would fall,
and turn the white snow red as
strawberries in the summertime.”