In the years 1980-1981 Daniel Johnston recorded his debut album, Songs of Pain. “Grievances” sets the tone for the album, fuzzy, lo-fi production with Johnston’s oddball voice and playful piano. While Johnston would later become an underground icon, that iconic status is nowhere to be found in Grievances. “Grievances” was recorded on a cassette in his parents’ basement, and that homespun intimacy shows in spades. “Grievances” is music that sounds truly independent, replacing ornate instrumentation and clean production with static. It’s an essential “home alone” song, where all you have are you and your thoughts contained in 4 walls.

         To me, “Grievances” is the quintessential “Winter Bedroom” song, and before you ask, yes, there is a huge difference between the bedroom in the winter versus the three other seasons. The Winter Bedroom isn’t just a spot to sleep and do work, it becomes its own little world. When the rest of civilization is buried beneath 6 feet of snow, there aren’t many places to go other than the bedroom. Sure, you have social media, but in reality, it’s just you, the pillows, and whatever you can see from your window. And when the world becomes so small, the little details become mountainous. This box of monotony turns into an endless space to get lost in until the sun finally returns in the spring. Johnston’s basement studio as realized in “Grievances” is a lot like a winter bedroom to me; small and cozy, a little bit happy and a little bit sad, and something that suggests a lot more depth than you would initially think.

         The pièce de resistance of the Winter Bedroom is the bedroom window. It’s the only tangible connection to the outside world and it’s only a pane of glass looking to the street. It’s often a sweet sight, falling snow speckled across the inky black night, but it’s also bittersweet. You can’t help but notice your own reflection, and the window view somehow manages to turn back inwards. Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 Tunnels” accompanies this view with a song that explores a surreal winter landscape only to finish where it began. It paints an impression of a winter, the familiar view of suburban homes topped with snow. As the narrator explores this landscape, he continues to fall backwards into himself. He stares at a winter world populated with childhood views of his parents, his family, his crushes, and all these parts of him stare back. The light keys and soft chords punctuate Win Butler’s injured voice. It’s a warm song, but one that remembers the feeling of the cold. It looks forwards and much as it looks back all reaching a crescendo of bittersweet revelations before fading back into the twinkling keys descending like snowflakes. The view from the winter bedroom is important as the only tangible link to the outside, but it’s also important as a mirror. A way to transform and reconsider ourselves in our own space. Try as you might, you cannot escape your own face among the falling snow.

         However, the winter bedroom isn’t purely a space for intense personal reflection, it’s also a breeding ground for fantasy. After a while, the cabinets start feeling less like storage and more like roommates. The familiarity of the room mutates into an entirely unknown world, where blanket folds and hardwood become vast oceans and endless terrain. “Ghost Mountain” by the Unicorns is a song that finds mountains in molehills. A quintessential “bedroom pop” song, its drum machines, synths, and lo-fi production reject the grandiose. Its minimalism becomes the most important element of the music. But the song sets its ambitions high, telling a story of a mountain expedition plagued by a vengeful ghost. A simplistic veneer gives way to an imaginative world of its own. Despite the song’s quietness, the more time spent with it gives way to thunderous music. Each element of the song finishes with a new identity, a place in the playful universe of “Ghost Mountain.” The space of the bedroom is nothing fancy, it’s just a place to sleep in between days outside. But in the winter, when a blanket of white covers everything you recognize, the outside world comes in. It’s warped, and a little bit strange, but when the world is confined to four walls, it’s bound to get a little loopy.

         “Step” by Vampire Weekend is a song about reminiscing. Stories of another place and another time, all about the narrator and a girl leading to a declaration of intent where our narrator “feels it in his bones.” Confinement can lead to reflection. Pacing the room back and forth thinking about things that have been is essential winter activity. Repeating and refracting your past over and over again, polishing the edges until the eureka moment. The moment where your muddied thoughts finally give way to clarity and a sudden rush of motivation. The only issue is that motivation has nowhere to go. You’re not about to jump headfirst into a Canadian winter. So, you continue your reminiscing, continuously reaching epiphanies that have to wait for the thaw before being applied to the real world. Just like Step’s harpsichord arpeggios, you’re stuck going up and down over and over in cozy but frustrating familiarity. Moments of revelation trapped in place are sweet and comforting, but like the street outside, they’re frozen solid. “Two Weeks” is a companion piece to “Step.” Musings of boredom and questions to nobody over ornate chords and punchy keys. It feels like the music of “Step” spilling out of your head. A clash of soft lyrics and beautiful instrumentation that feels loud and powerful. It threatens to knock you down, but it just surrounds you, like watching a blizzard out your window while safely within the warmth of your bedsheets. It can be happy or sad, but it feels distant, nonetheless.

         Inevitably, the winter bedroom leads to loneliness. Not necessarily one of resignation, but a quick reminder that a lot of the time, it’s just you in that bedroom. Very few songs capture the simplistic rush of a pang of loneliness quite like The Magnetic Fields’ “With Whom To Dance?” One of the defining qualities of the winter bedroom is its brevity, a few months in and out. It may feel like an eternity, but it always ends. “With Whom To Dance?” is a man and his guitar, washed out and quiet, a heartfelt ode to nobody in particular in less than two and a half minutes. It’s raw above all else, because despite the metamorphosis of the winter bedroom, sometimes things cut through the fog. Reality is a fast kick in the teeth, and the crude honesty of the Magnetic Fields’ plea for companionship is a cutesy snap back to the truth.

         Despite the various emotions and experiences of the songs prior, sometimes everything becomes a blur. The monotony collapses and the recursion overwhelms you. Any semblance of a “bedroom” melts into a singular rush of feeling. The textures of your desk and the view from your window become familiar to the degree of unfamiliarity. You’re caught in a vortex of the things you know, falling into unrecognizable sameness. “Stars and Sons” from Broken Social Scene feels like a muted explosion of analog recollection. It sounds like everything you know about music blended together into a wash of sound. You can pick up hints of lyrics, maybe a guitar solo, clapping, but it all fades in and out of the soupy muck. The winter bedroom’s mutation feels a lot like “Stars and Sons.” After so much time, it becomes one entity, and its inescapable pull brings you to a place of safe melancholy. It’s all the feelings of winter layered on one another where the only dominating voice is the unadulterated wistful coziness.

         Yet the story of the winter bedroom doesn’t finish there. It’s not doomed to implode and take you down with it, because in due time the sun comes back out. A sliver of blue cuts through the grey sky and the suffocation of the season takes a momentary pause. Of course, you’re still inside, and that’s not ending anytime soon, but the joy of the outside materializes inside, if for a second. A reminder of what you once had and what’s to come, but most of all the idea of something bigger. Beirut’s “Postcards from Italy” is a lament stuck in time. Evoking an era passed with vivid lyricism and playful 20^th century instrumentation, the song starts with a feeling of going through old photos. It’s classic winter bedroom music, built on bones of the past, then halfway through something changes. The song’s melancholy is replaced by a soaring trumpet, dredging up old memories and invoking them with new life. Beirut brings their old European sensibilities to life, using what has passed to aspire to a new day. Whether it be the return of greenery, the sun coming out, or a friend calling you up, willing to brave the frigid temperatures to grab a cup of coffee, something breaks the spell, and like Beirut, we would love to see that day. 

The past seven songs have strived to create a world. They’ve granted life to windows and beds, and they’ve scored feelings of romance and nostalgia, but it ends. The triumphant trumpet promises the escape. The winter bedroom will always be there, bound to return each year sure to bring along a whole mess of feelings along with it. But there will always be distance, and you’ll always have no choice but to brave the world once again. Each song invites you to a landscape of isolated protection, but they always push you back out. Sure, the landscape of the winter bedroom has transformed to take on new life, but it’s still just a bedroom, and there’s a whole world waiting outside just beneath the frost.

Listen to Zachary’s playlist here.