Winter Songs

An amazing piece on NPR's All Things Considered tonight. They're doing a series called "Winter Songs" where they invite various people to choose a song that evokes winter for them, and explain why. Tonight their guest was choreographer Bill T. Jones, who chose a Schubert piece called "Die Leiermann" (The Hurdy Gurdy Man), which is part of a song cycle called "Winterreise" (Winter Journey). Jones talks about how the song for him is bound up with memories of his father, in particular one winter afternoon when he saw his father from the window of his fourth-grade classroom. Go here to listen to it.

Is there a song (beyond the obvious, like carols) that you associate with winter? Oddly enough, for me it's Abba's Move On. I had just started dating my first boyfriend in October of 1980, and he had given me this album. I had to go away over Christmas with my family to south Texas, and I was convinced he would forget about me in the TEN DAYS I was gone so I listened to it relentlessly before we left. So there you go: Abba + South Padre Island = winter song.