Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The melody and phrasing of the lyric “Smile and hang your head” kills me everytime. It’s like a 3 page short story that leaves you breathless with the amount of soul and imagery in such little space. Man, I love this tune.
Liner notes from Wil Hendricks:
“Snow” was definitely a turning-point tune for us. When we were making “When We Were Lost”, we knew we wanted to make a really cohesive, narrative-based, “All Things Must Pass”-style album — but we got there kind of on accident, and “Snow” had a lot to do with that.
Originally, “Snow” was a more personal song, about a family member who had passed recently. (As it happens, “Snow” is one of a handful of tunes that I wrote on my own, as opposed to working collaboratively with my partner Michael Krassner.) But I was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of writing about loss like that — making artistic “gain” out of a personal tragedy.
In any case, one day I was mulling over the lyrics, and suddenly sort of realized that everything I’d written entirely reminded me of my favorite film, Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm” — in fact, my words seemed to already be more about the film than they were about my original subject… With that in mind, the rest of the tune sort of wrote itself. I called Krassner and played it for him — at which point he proceeded to start writing the tune “Response” as a sort of “answer-song” to mine (even inverting the chords of “Snow” for the intro).
From there, we made the choice to re-work the entire batch of songs as a sort of concept-record, using the characters in the film as our palette. (We didn’t make any reference to it in the liner notes or anything — we chose to not use actual specific names or ideas as much as we could; we always subscribed to the idea of using really specific images and scenarios in our lyrics, but without giving much context, so that the listener could sort of plug those images into their own storyline… although, in this case, certain titles like “At The Station”, or maybe the line “If you’re cold, I’ll carry you” from “Snow” were pretty obvious clues regarding the subject matter.)
So it wound up being a pivotal song for us — both “Lost” and the follow-up record (“Amsterdam”) became these big concept-records (to us, if no-one else) based almost solely on the introduction of the imagery in “Snow” — our whole lyrical approach changed stemming from that, becoming much more 3rd-person narrative, and much more story-oriented — or, at least, it gave us a good excuse to really hone in on that aspect of our writing.
Which is sort of funny, since “Snow” was, structurally speaking, sort of originally intended as a sort of faux-homage to a decidedly LESS serious tune, “Shannon” — Henry Gross’s gorgeously sappy farewell ode to Carl Wilson’s dead Irish Setter. (Yes, that’s right. That tune is about a dead dog. Not even his own dead dog.) But I was originally trying to capture that same vibe, of it being really beautiful and sad while still retaining an element of silliness in it. (I failed.)
-w