Teardrops in the snow: 6 Minnesota songs about the cruelty of winter
Sharon Dominick
Jeremy Messersmith, "Beautiful Children" (from 2006's The Alcatraz Kid)
Jeremy Messersmith should just get business cards printed up proclaiming him to be the Twin Cities' favorite bearded songwriter. His smooth tenor and knack for writing lyrics as detailed as they are poignant is evident in "Beautiful Children," which has been known to cause people to weep openly at shows. It's a tale of unrequited love, with a winter setting twisting a knife already in deep. Our protagonist leaves the scene of his rejection in the middle of the night, "sowing teardrops in the snow," and the final kiss-off, "Does he love you? / I hope he loves you / If he doesn't / At least you'll have beautiful children" is as cold as the January windchill.
City On The Make, "Mass Project Engineering" (from 2009's Keep This On Fire)
Not only do we repeatedly suffer through winters here, but we also suffer the disdain of people who don't live here. Other places are cooler simply because they don't have Midwest winters, as City On The Make's frontman Mike Massey knows full well. The funky little blues number "Mass Project Engineering" kicks off with girls moving away to Oakland, Calif., to get more awesome, or to Brooklyn to get cool boyfriends. You can hear Massey's incredulousness when he proclaims that he moved to Milwaukee—"Milwaukee, Wisconsin!"—only to return to Minneapolis where his "hands are always freezing." Whatever good projects we might have going here, the winters still suck.
The Replacements, "Skyway" (from 1987's Pleased To Meet Me)
They're an odd invention, skyways. We built them to keep us warm during the crushing Minnesota winters; for people to scuttle about between buildings without having to face the harsh realities that loom on the other side of any given exit. They serve a specific and much-needed function but they're also clunky, isolating, and vaguely uncomfortable. Lead singer Paul Westerberg addresses those side effects here. The Replacements were and really still are Minneapolis' lovable losers, and this song paints a perfect picture of that sentiment. Westerberg wanders the frozen streets admiring a girl who he often sees walking in that model of Midwestern innovation. The day he decides he's going to take a chance, he walks through the skyway, only to spot her where he usually is: on the street. If you know downtown Minneapolis, you realize he might as well be on the moon. Being warm has never been more bone-chilling.
Low, "Last Snowstorm Of The Year" (from 2002's Trust)
For Low, a band that's made its bones creating molasses-slow, soul-crushing songs, this one is almost upbeat. But make no mistake, it belongs on the list. "When we were young / we wanted to die" it begins, and maybe singer Alan Sparhawk isn't explicitly referring to winter, but we can relate. It almost seems as if Sparhawk relishes the winters because that's when "we wrote all those songs," but that's what people do out of boredom in the Midwest. He leaves the door open to interpretation as to why, but it's conceivable he can't face the last snowstorm for the same reason a lot of people can't: It might not be the end. Winter always seems to hold on for longer than it should; indeed, much longer than is necessary or polite. The last storm of the year is never the last one. We never realize it was the last one until, suddenly, we're all wearing shorts and waterskiing on a lake somewhere. It doesn't sound too bad when you talk about it, but put into practice, the constant threat of one more blizzard as spring begins to dawn on the horizon makes the most even-keeled among us want to cut Old Man Winter with a rusty prison shiv.
Stook, "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (from 2007's When The Needle Hit The Wax)
Native Hoosier Joshua Stuckey is full of upbeat numbers in the country-fried rock vein of Tom Petty and The Jayhawks, but here he slows things down to perfectly illustrate the hopeless despair winter brings out in many people. "Spend all my time at traffic lights / fightin' the city life / wishing it was all just a dream," he sings, summing up an Upper Midwest urban winter in three lines. We fall into a mundane existence during the winter months: wake up in the dark, go to work, come home in the dark. Making plans to do things during the week gets pushed off, then doesn't happen at all. Eventually we start to live in a weird sort of suspended animation where nothing ever really happens, and every conversation revolves around speculation as to when winter's relentlessness might let up. Problems, particularly any lingering feelings of loneliness, are magnified in winter, making it easier to dwell on the negative aspects of everything. "Pick myself up tomorrow / but tonight I'm going to cry myself to sleep" goes the chorus, and who hasn't said that on a sub-zero January night?
Hüsker Dü, "Ice Cold Ice" (from 1987's Warehouse: Songs And Stories)
Although he's mellowed out quite a bit as he's gotten older—which can only have been healthy for him—when Bob Mould was wielding his axe in seminal punk trio Hüsker Dü, he pretty much owned the subgenre of bitterly angry relationship songs. In this classic from their final album, Warehouse: Songs And Stories, Mould sees the bleak cold of winter as a frozen hell where nothing happens and nobody can move forward with their lives—"barren lands and barren minds" with "blank expressions waiting for progression." It's all about feeling not merely trapped, but imprisoned by the harshness of your surroundings—a feeling Minnesotans know only too well around mid-February. Mould holds out a little bit of hope in the last verse, declaring "my love for you will never die," before winding up with a closer so maudlin that even Morrissey might have balked at it: "If I sound distant, that's because you shouldn't see me cry in ice cold ice." The "Ice Cold Ice" 7-inch single, released in 1987, wound up being the Hüsker Dü swan song—appropriate, perhaps, given the legendarily chilly relationship between Mould and co-leader Grant Hart.
