A Wintry Mix
Sure, its the holiday season! A time replete with the musical canon of Christmas (and sometimes Hannukah too)! But, for agnostics and atheists, and those religion practitioners of other faiths, Christmas music might not be getting played on repeat. If you feel like celebrating winter without the religious undertones of Jesus’ brith, here are some records you should check out:
Bon Iver - “For Emma, Forever Ago” (2007)
Recorded in a remote cabin in Wisconsin, Bon Iver’s debut record infuses folk with heavy choral arrangements and a Mahalia Jackson esque falsetto. Tracks from this record like “Skinny Love” have come to define Bon Iver’s career.
Of the record, Justin Vernon says “I arrived at the cabin in November, so there's a very big winter theme for everything when I was there. On a physical level, I would wake up to stoke the fire or get wood chopped to get it in the house to keep warm. Just winter in general was kind of a part of where I was physically and metaphysically as well. It bled into the music naturally”
2. Kate Bush - “50 Words for Snow (2011)
Bush’s albums title comes from the thought that the Eskimo have 50 words for snow, leading her to invent her own vocabulary for that miraculous precipitation: spangladasha, anechoic, and Robber’s veil among them.
An arctic fantasia, “50 Words for Snow” explores the life of a snowman paramour who melts into oblivion after a night of passion and how snow snuffs out the sound of a raucous Earth, among other wintery, areligious themes.
3. Bjork - “Vespertine”
On the making of this record, Bjork said “a word that helped me a lot making this record was ‘hibernation.’ Being internal is a form of hibernation, and I related it to winter, the sound of crystals in wintertime that’s what I wanted this album to sound like.”
Bjork did the bulk of the production on Vespertine and worked on the record over the course of three years. It is a masterwork of winter that demands our ears.
During these coming cold months, you can fill your ears with the sounds of snowflakes and harsh winters as captured by some of our world’s brightest artists. Let them lead you through that long, cold night..and perhaps a bit of hibernation!
