The Nights Were Long and Cold and Scary

Can we live through February?

When I was in my third year of university, my closest friend Dan left our fairly sleepy college town in Ontario in favour of a loosely planned trip to Scotland. He ended up working in a hostel on the Isle of Skye and impressing the locals with his stone skipping skills. The last thing we did before he left was go see The Inbreds play at Zaphod Beeblebrox, a club in downtown Ottawa that had a very good run of booking bands for many years*. Afterwards we walked down Rideau Street and looked at drum kits in the window of Steve’s Music, imagining an alternate universe where he didn’t go to Scotland and we started a band instead.

He went to Scotland, we didn’t start a band. I joined a band with other friends a year later. The band wasn’t great, but we did open for Sarah Harmer once and that was cool, and we broke up shortly afterwards. Anyway, this is not a story about my dubious musical past or even about Dan going to Scotland. It is actually a story about the mixtape he brought back from Scotland that one of his hostel co-workers had made for him. The cassette was full of an eclectic mix of folk and rock songs. But it had no track listing, so any song that was new to us remained a mystery. Dan was staying at my apartment until he found one of his own and one night he brought the cassette into the kitchen and put it into our tape deck.

“I can’t stop listening to this song.” He said, pressing play. “Do you know what it is? Or recognize the singer?” I sat down to listen.

The song started with a bright acoustic guitar chord progression, joined quickly by a slide guitar and then a slightly melancholy female vocal.

“I’ve never had a way with women, but the hills of Iowa make me wish that I could.”

I have always found that line to be kind of goofy, but hearing it there for the first time, I was as taken in by the song as Dan was. I had no idea who sang it, didn’t recognize the voice at all. We played it for my roommates. Neither of them knew it either.

This was 1996. The internet was a collection of message boards that I did not care to navigate. There was no Google, no music streaming. We were a few years away from Napster and Limewire and Shazam. If you didn’t know what a song was, you just… didn’t know.

But I wasn’t willing to give up and at the time I had an acoustic guitar that I used primarily to play sad REM covers while alone in my room. So I listened to the mystery song until I could suss out the chord progressions, and then I wrote out the lyrics and learned to sing it. I’m not a great singer, but this was in a reasonable key for me, and I was able to carry the tune.

So, after a few weeks of me playing the song around the apartment, Dan and I took it to the streets. And by “the streets” I mean the campus pub (it was actually a portable classroom with blockprint sheets hung on the walls and a small bar in the corner) nearby that was having an open mic night. When it was my turn on stage I introduced the song with the story of the mysterious Scottish mixtape and asked that audience members identify the song for us if they could. Within one verse a young woman I knew from my first year dorm stood up and shouted, “DAR WILLIAMS!”

I’d never heard of Dar Williams, but that night I found out that the song I’d been playing on my acoustic guitar for the past month was her song “Iowa” from her Mortal City record. I purchased the CD as soon as possible. It played almost constantly in our small, three bedroom apartment and I put numerous tracks onto the mixtapes I made for friends.

This wasn’t one of the better times in my life. That’s not Dar Williams’ fault, but regardless the emotional ups and downs of my final years in that university town came to have Mortal City as their soundtrack. As a result I avoided the album for years, only dipping into it here and there, if I was randomly reminded of a song. That’s what happened one day when I was walking home from work one evening, listening to Pete Holmes interview Williams for his You Made it Weird podcast. At the end of the episode, which is full of interesting discussion between the two of them, Williams gets ready to play a song and is tuning her guitar. Holmes asks her what song is in that key and she says “February.” Holmes is instantly excited. “I was going to ask you to play February!” He enthuses. “‘Cause I like sad songs.” Williams responds, “Oh yeah, me too” her tone casual, as if they’d both said they liked tomato soup. Because for Williams, sad songs seem to come naturally. She’s a funny songwriter too in some cases (see “The Pointless, Yet Poignant Crisis of a Co-ed” which has given me the gift of aways being able to mutter “a name like that doesn't make a good acronym” whenever it is warranted) (My day job is in government, so it is warranted A LOT). Being sometimes funny but then also sometimes deeply devastating is one of the unique qualities that sets Williams apart as a songwriter. Anyway, I cried when she played the song live on the podcast and I think Pete Holmes did too.

When I got home I posted on my rarely used Facebook account “What is the saddest song you know?” and nominated “February” as my own pick. It was second favourite Facebook post ever (the first being the time I asked “How many people on your Facebook friends list have you made out with?” and all hell broke loose). People love to talk about sad songs. The responses poured in. Mountain Goats, Joy Division, Beautiful South, Gordon Lightfoot, Iris Dement… The song that got the most votes was “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Disappearance” by the Weakerthans which tells you a lot about who I am friends with.

I listen to Mortal City more regularly these days and I think, if it is not associated with one of the most disorienting and sad periods of your young adulthood, it really stands up as a quality collection of songs. I’m glad it has been a part of my life for so long. Thank you, mystery mixtape.

*Memorable shows I saw at Zaphods over the years included Yo La Tengo (Ira let me pick the encore and I chose Sugarcube and it remains one of my top five live music moments), Evan Dando, Ari Up (she signed my Slits album and wrote “in the beginning, there was love” beside her signature and I cry every time I look at it), Jonathan Richman, Library Voices, Juliana Hatfield, Ted Leo, and Sheezer (an all-girl Weezer cover band).

February 2024 Songs

For further sad or funny listening here is “February” and “The Pointless Yet Poignant Crisis of a Coed”.

Three sad songs about Virtute the cat by the beloved Weakerthans. (Question for John K. Sampson: are you trying to kill us with sadness?)

And, if you’ll go way back up to the beginning of this post, you’ll note the mention of The Inbreds who I still love after all these years. Whenever anyone I know is late for anything, my brain soundtrack immediately plays “Any Sense of Time”.

February 2024 Feelings

(Hey! Before we get into this month’s books I wanted to say that my book MAKE ME A MIXTAPE will still not be out for another nine months BUT you can now add it on Goodreads and preorder it or demand that your library order it or whatever it is you like to do when you’re looking forward to a new release.)

Two very different books to recommend this month that elicited a very different selection of feelings. Jane Fallon writes the twisty-est plots populated with engaging, complex characters and as a result her books are almost always super hard to put down. Worst Idea Ever is an older novel that doesn’t seem to have been published widely in North American (Fallon is English) and so my husband had to work to track it down for me as a Christmas present. I read it over a couple of days early in the new year and was pleased that it had all the qualities that I’ve come to appreciate in Fallon’s work- conniving fake friends, surprising reveals, and loveable pets. This is the kind of book that you could take on an airplane and it would be so engrossing you’d hardly notice how bleak and stressful air travel is.

The Vanderbeekers Ever After is the final instalment in Karina Yan Glaser’s series about this large, loving family living in a brownstone in Harlem, getting into various scrapes and triumphing with the help of their community. These are the best kind of middle-grade novels because they don’t shy away from serious issues, but are written in a way that invites young readers in, rather than making them pull away from the heavier situations. All that said, I was initially resistant to this one, because the plot (not a spoiler, this is an early reveal) centres on one of the siblings being diagnosed with cancer. I will admit to feeling momentarily upset that Yan Glaser would leave the series on such a devastating note, but I was won over by the kindness and love that exists on every page of this. It ended up being a perfect final book for a series that has never shied away from tough topics, but has always hung on to the compassion and heart of the characters and their community.

Thanks for reading! See you next month.

J.W.

Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites

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My debut romance novel, MAKE ME A MIXTAPE is coming from Doubleday in 2024.