Summer in Snow
There’s something particularly grim about February Mondays. The snow stopped being interesting weeks ago—it’s accumulated, compacted, turned the color of concrete. You wake up and it’s still dark. The day ahead feels flat before it even starts.
Music gets you through it, but not all music. The sad songs you love in November feel like quicksand by February. You need something with a different temperature to it.
I started grabbing tracks that had some kind of lift without being saccharine. Toro y Moi with ’Low’—that shimmer that cuts through everything. Ellie Goulding’s ’Under the Sheets’ because she knows how to make production feel warm. Brett Anderson doing that thing where melancholy sounds intelligent instead of needy. Then Delphic, Adam Green, Vampire Weekend, Tegan and Sara from Canada—each carrying something that pushed back against the season instead of drowning in it.
The logic was dumb but real: assemble enough songs that didn’t deny winter but wouldn’t let it win, either. Songs to listen to while pacing the apartment. Songs that made the hours feel less glacial.
By the time I finished that first run-through, the place felt marginally less cold. Not warmed by the music exactly—more like the season had loosened its grip for forty-five minutes. That’s enough.