Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Cold, White Christmas
2007.Jun.29
You know how winters that start with crisp, dark nights and romance and the promise of heavy, cleansing snowfalls always degenerate into dirty, slushy, wet, stained, cigarette butt-scapes that are just chilling and gray and nothing else? Lay that scene under the life of a stubborn, poor, sad college student and that’s “Cold, White Christmas.” Casiotone for the Painfully Alone mines the dreariness of winter in the north for its ability to strip every ounce of charm from being on your own, alone:
and you ignore the smell of mold as you smooth out the folds
when you're on your own you've got no one to please
in a Minnesota city just as bare and as mean as the winter trees
As in no one to please. Even oneself. Maybe St. Paul is somehow charming in the dead of winter. But if every other city eventually becomes a bleak and featureless palette of dirty gray and dirty white (including Minneapolis) probably St. Paul does, too.
MAPPING IT
The whole of St. Paul, MN. (Geom from OSM.)
HEARING IT
The better version is from a Daytrotter session, but the studio version: