Winter

A Meditation On What Remains

I love discovering hidden songs from favorite artists and eras. I recall a friend mentioning Astral Weeks from Van Morrison when I was 20. When I heard it years later, sitting around a campfire with friends, I was fascinated.

The lyrics were visual, kinetic, and emergent--a stream of consciousness that flowed between description and exposition. I was transported to ‘another place and another time.’ The instrumentation was layered and played spontaneously. The songs exuded aliveness and joy that permeated the poesy and yet arrived in simple garb.

After that seminal album, I wondered if other artists felt liberated to approach their music with similar abandon and subversion.

I giddily discovered Winter by the Rolling Stones a couple of months ago. I thought it a stylistic homage to Astral Weeks and yet distinct–a stirring meditation that gave me pause. It told me something about love that I had missed, which is why we listen.

Then I listen again on repeat–decoding and decanting. Letting this unearthed appellation breathe. Beckoning its strings and strums to shower their pent-up electricity onto my waiting ears. Riding the locomotion of the drums and chord changes that crash the emotional waves and stir the ingredients.

A transmission from the Gods. A gleaming artifact unearthed. An artist’s expressionist rendering of a moment and a mood so distinct. We are invited into his and her private wavelength, their sacred love-bubble. Yet such offerings are a universal decree about what it means to be alive and human and ensouled.

These offerings grant us overt permission to feel and yearn. To try and capture the essence of a moment–to bridge the distance between two beleaguered spirits. Like any real love song, Winter is a public baring of the soul. An unconditional surrender. When no known recourse is revealed. When no salve soothes the ache, art is the only afforded option. They and we venture to distill a fading sunset and its synchronistic starlings as they flutter and vanish.

The song couches its meaning in elemental allusions–seasons and winds–and the imagery they inspire. This imparts a cold weariness, but the telling feels warm and open as I listen. He speaks his laments and and yet counters with a hope that change and renewal will arrive with Spring.

I love how the narrator speaks of events and locations that don’t reveal much to the listener. Like it’s not for us to know what those places mean. The restoration plays. The bell, book and candle. California and Stone Canyon. We are left to imagine what secret meaning is encoded. But maybe the song is saying that the details are superfluous. Because the details don’t last. Perhaps it’s enough for us to just witness his love letter.

And to remember the odes we’ve sent--and the missives not fired.

To cherish our memories as he savors his. To honor our connections, strained though they may be. The souls we know and knew. The people and places and faces we remember--that showed us who we are. Those that awoke us from slumber. The ones that stir us.

He finally speaks directly to her as the song comes to a crescendo before closing.

‘Sometimes I think about you, baby’

‘Sometimes I cry about you’

‘Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you

Sometimes I wanna keep you warm

Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you’

This is the heart of the song

As the strings rise and swell

No request or complaint

No bid for reassurance or even connection

Wanting just to keep warm his beloved

To humbly protect, to shelter

A bulwark from the elements

A shepherd, a beacon, a lighthouse

Warm love with nowhere to go

A familial and timeless love

Bonded and gracious

And it doesn’t fade

It reveals itself as other layers fall away