Vashti Bunyan's Songs of Winter
Baby, it's cold out there (and it's getting colder)
I found Vashti Bunyan’s music during my first “real” job after college, cold-calling dormant accounts for a car rental company and asking them if they might like to come back to the fold. Since much of my job was making phone calls that almost nobody enjoyed receiving, I cherished the hours at work where I didn’t have to talk, where I could send emails or update a spreadsheet and listen to music.
I listened to an enormous amount of music at that job, in a way that I haven’t before or since. Whenever my headset wasn’t on, my headphones were. Something about the stultifying nature of sales work, paired with the first-year-out desperation of a recent grad, had me reaching for the unvarnished, the earnest, the beautiful. I read Anna Karenina riding the purple line into work; Peter and I traded esoteric ambient albums through our work emails—I’d listen to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops for hours at my desk, drawing circles in my notebook.
It was my first winter in Chicago, and I was acutely aware of the cold. Waiting for the bus before the sun rose, walking home in the dark. All of the scarce hours of sunlight were swallowed up by this office, save the sacred lunch hour when Pete and I would fight our way through the biting cold air to go to the coffeeshop and read and gossip.
In these long, dark days, I found Vashti Bunyan, buried somewhere in a Spotify playlist. There is nothing harsh or discordant about a Vashti Bunyan song. Just Another Diamond Day, her 1970 album, starts with guitar and flute and humming—humming! She rarely gets loud. She is often wistful but rarely bitter. The stories of her songs are often retrospectives or hypothetical. And often—like, a lot—she sings about winter.
“Winter is Blue” is the first one I noticed. She sings awful sad lyrics so gently.
Winter is blue
Everything's leaving
Fires are now burning
And life has no reason
I am alone
Waiting for nothing
If my heart freezes, I won't feel the breaking
It’s always hard to know winter will end, that it won’t be winter forever. It’s almost a comfort how cyclical that feeling of dread, cabin fever, whatever you want to call it is. It always comes back, every year! Vashti knows this. And yet, in her songs, she walks towards the cold, towards winter.
“Train Song” begins with the dreary rhythm of movement: “Traveling north, traveling north to find you,” she sings. “Don't even know what I'll find when I get to you,” she says, later.
At the start of January this year (so, two weeks ago), I became obsessed with this time management book (time management books are self-help books for boys, maybe?) called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. One of his big concepts, returned to often, is that you will never have time to do everything you want, and that using your time well requires acknowledging your own finite abilities, the less-than-ideal circumstances you will always be in. In other words: don’t shunt the work onto an idealized future self, because that self will never exist: the you of right now is all you’ve got.
A lot of the book is about how accepting discomfort, rather than trying to avoid or distract yourself from it, is almost always a worthwhile endeavor. I find this kind of barren, desperate honesty often in folk songs. I found it in Vashti.
She’s not always sad—she sings often of nature and pastoral beauty, of creatures (“Glow Worms,” “17 Pink Sugar Elephants”) and wishes (“I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind.”) But the other side of that coin is the awful cold, the emptiness of a love affair ended. She sings about it all.
A recent favorite, “The Coldest Night of the Year,” is an unexpectedly jangly and sweet duet, with a similar conceit to “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” Outside sucks, the song goes. Stay in here with me. It’s nihilistic in that way love songs occasionally are.
Let's snuggle close together
While the whole world turns to ice
Just the victims of the weather
Baby, it's cold out there (and it's getting colder) sing the lovers.
It’s winter again. The days are short, and the holidays are over. A wet, warm December has given way to a frigid January. The weather is changing, the climate is changing. If I think about it too hard, my brain begins the steep slide towards panic. But I do have to think about it, have to acknowledge the less-than-ideal circumstances we’re all in. We’re in the thick of it, and we’re all we’ve got. Baby, it’s cold out there (and it’s getting colder).
In the spring that followed my first winter in Chicago, I quit my job and went to work in an ice cream shop, a busy and messy and LOUD job that was the exact opposite of those quiet chilled days in the sales office. I found the next thing, and then the next thing. Burkeman’s right: my idealized future self never showed up. But I knew I could make it through the cold, at least for another winter. I know that still.