What takes church of the song in the winter?
Answers
Explanation:
The Mamas and the Papas (1965)
Its title and its harmonies suggest sunshine and freedom, but this beautiful song is incredibly bleak. A man goes for a walk on a winter’s day, the leaves brown, the sky grey. He prays in a church, but it’s pointless: the preacher “knows I’m going to stay”. The line that packs the iciest punch is: “If I didn’t tell her, I could leave today”. Didn’t tell her what – that he loved her? Whatever the reason, safety and sunshine blaze on far away. Simon & Garfunkel’s A Hazy Shade of Winter, released 10 months later, features the “leaves are brown” as a pointed homage.
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen on stage at the Musikhalle in Hamburg, Germany, May 1970. Photograph: K&K Ulf Kruger OHG/Redferns
2 | Famous Blue Raincoat
Leonard Cohen (1971)
Winter nights are coldest, but they’re also the darkest. Leonard Cohen’s slow lament begins at “four in the morning, the end of December”, with a man writing a letter. “New York is cold,” Cohen sings, mentioning the “music on Clinton Street”, stuff the Lower East Side renter would have heard in real life. Then his protagonist’s tone turns: “You’re living for nothing now,” he whispers. The tale of a complicated love triangle, and a death either literal or metaphorical (“my brother, my killer”), it is a song Cohen never thought he finished properly, despite it being one of his greatest.
This track begins like a twisted mystery story. Mona and Mary have gone out without their mittens, and Michael, Matthew and Mark are out in the dark, despite 4.572 metres of white stuff being on the ground. Then the cold hacks in: the protagonist begins to freeze, get icicles on his knees and later tells a doctor he’s paralysed by a lack of feeling. The cold of the body and the mind are perceptibly intertwined, as they would be four years later on Arcade Fire’s Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels), children digging through the snow as they leave their parents crying.