Nine sounds for snow

Halloween, Alaska - The Light Bulb Does

Winter seems to be a strange phenomenon in Blacksburg. It sneaks up on us, and it can be moderately warm, mid sixties in December and early January, and we think nothing of it. But when wintertime truly rolls around, and temperatures are peaking in the twenties and falling into single digits, it's as if the world has gone mad. Maybe it's just that we're all too busy to notice that it's indeed getting colder out there. We forget to check the weather each day, and I know I was quite surprised when I walked out the door this afternoon to find already half an inch of snow.

It's nights like this where all I want to do is curl up into my blankets and sleep until spring. Most everyone has the same urge right now, be it coffee or hot chocolate, warm soup or grilled cheese. For me, winter brings another thought to mind - sparse, floaty sounds that drift by like the loose snow on hills. That's what I feel whenever I listen to this particular track, or anything else from Halloween Alaska's second album, Too Tall to Hide.

It was an album that hit me just at the perfect time, one that had been released around September but didn't really get noticed until late December, when the year was pretty much over. I was going through a difficult time that winter, having lost my greatest friend and truest love to distance and any number of other unalterable factors. The strangest part about it, to everyone but me, is that we were never "together" in a relationship sense, yet I loved her more dearly than anyone I'd ever known, and probably ever will. But that story's for another song.

I remember spending my late nights listening to these tracks on repeat, huddled up in blankets in the corner of my room, and waiting to fall asleep. Something about the endless reverb of the piano and the heartbeat pulsing drum programming was soothing to me in a very difficult time. It seemed to be such a definitive sound for winter, as if somehow they had taken the surreal and soothing center of winter and pumped it in through my ears. Something in that sound made me feel warm, despite the freezing temperatues. I was happy, or at least I thought I was. It was a massive loss for me, yet somehow I found solace in those songs.

It's in this that Halloween Alaska helped me keep my mind afloat that winter. It was a cold time, a difficult time. Listening to it now brings back the emptiness, but it also brings back the warmth. Grilled cheese with apples inside. Watching movies under piles of blankets. The first snow, the one that came in December for once, as we walked to class early one morning. The last snow, when I brought her hot chocolate as we studied for our last final exam of college. The day she left for other countries, and greener fields, and people with names that were spelled the same but with different sounds.

And for the day after, wondering if she had ever been real at all.

Plug in, and turn it up...