Published in the Quad-City Times on Jan. 10, 2024

When I think of growing up in the desert, I think monochromatically.

Those rolling, ragged hills of sepia, sienna and sandstone seemed to go on forever. I struggled to grasp the vastness. 

In my small hometown, at least 40 miles of nothing stood between me and the nearest metropolis. You could see the faint glow of Las Vegas over the mountains at night, when the pigmented homogeny of the desert in between really took shape. Equilibrium came only from the enormous sky above. 

But one day, it snowed. Exactly once. During my senior year of high school, on a winter day where the temperatures creeped cautiously under 30 degrees, snow dusted those baked hills like powdered sugar. It was beautiful and colorful, if only for a few hours before it melted in the Nevada afternoon sun. 

When I look out of my Midwestern window during the first snowstorm of 2024, the first snowstorm of my life, the monochrome has returned. There is nothing but white. 

It’s an odd feeling, because I’ve grown to love the Quad-Cities for its spectrum. The contrast of the cobalt Mississippi and the pastel architecture on the Arsenal. The explosion of reds in October. The prismatic bead of sweat on my eyebrow on a green, summer afternoon. 

But today, the Quad-Cities are a desert of color. A blanket — no, a blank slate — lays over the top of my new home this week. There’s a sterilization to snow that feels impossible, and for now, I love it.

I’ve seen this singular stroke before in the hills of Nevada, where the future was once something to dwell on. But now, the field of white outside is a sheet of paper to write a story onto. 

So to commemorate the first snow of winter, I’ll write in a language I know, by sharing a few albums that sound like snowfall. Desolate and daunting, but delicately gorgeous. Hopefully they’re as new to you as snowstorms are to me.

But first, a few local notes.

Concert of The Week: Anna p.s. at The Grape Life on Friday

Do yourself a favor and check out Indiana folk songwriter Anna p.s. Her bedroom acoustics and soft woodwind accents are a perfect fit for this snowy week in the Quad-Cities, and you can see her for free at The Grape Life wine lounge in Davenport on Friday.

The show starts at 8 p.m. and Anna’s newest record, “11 songs till sunday,” released in October, is necessary listening before the show. 

On This Daytrotter: Laura Marling on Jan. 11, 2012

Next up, I have to note how neat it is that Laura Marling was once here in our backyard. You cannot draw a line through snowy folk music without running into the English singer once, twice, three times or more. Marling’s prowess was clear from the first notes of “Ghosts,” a masterfully complicated relationship ballad and the first song on her debut record. 

The Quad-Cities were lucky enough to have her for a Daytrotter session this week in 2012. While she didn’t play it that day, one of Marling’s most iconic tracks, “Goodbye England (Covered In Snow),” is a more than fitting addition to this column. 

“I might be cold but I’m just skin and bones,” she sings. “And I’ll never love England more than when it’s covered in snow.”

Now, onto the coldest records I can find.

Horse Feathers – House With No Home (2009)

“House With No Home” is the quintessential snow album. It’s gentle, yet crisp. From the barn struck with frost on the record’s cover to the sparse string-laden instrumentation, it’s perfect for a day like today. It’s sub-freezing from Horse Feathers songwriter Justin Ringle’s first wispy uttering on album opener “Curs In The Weeds.” 

“Lover of things, won’t you agree how the winter could bring the darkest spring?” he asks, with a brazenness disguised only by the softness of his whisper.

“Father” and its reprise are the best tracks from this record’s B-side, a devastating generational drama as chilling as January itself. 

Flatsound – when you run away, do you close your eyes (2022)

If you look long enough at a snowflake, you can see the space between the ice. The small, geometric holes where no water is frozen but the air still is. Somewhere in that gap you’ll find Flatsound’s slowcore folk album, “when you run away, do you close your eyes,” a record so lonely that it has the audacity to even pity the man above the clouds.

“There’s a man above us watching you perform, I bet he feels so alone,” songwriter Mitch Welling wonders on “pretending to stare out at the sea.” 

The heart-wrenching lo-fi “simple as snow” is an easy choice for the most wintered song on the record. There, the flickers of acoustic guitar grow less and less fuzzy, and songwriter Mitch Welling seems to be finding his way out of the blizzard. Cleaner, warmer, wiser. 

Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1970)

I can’t write about cold without writing about Nick Drake. One of the best to ever do it, Drake seems to write with the snow falling around him, his answers up in the air. Question marks color the “could’ve beens” of “One Of These Things First” and the curiosity of “Hazey Jane I.” It’s all capped off by one of the best love songs ever written, “Northern Sky,” a plea as gently luminescent as aurora borealis.

Beyond the lyricism, the guitar work is technically genius and tonally hot chocolate, and Drake’s voice could echo in my eardrums until the snow melts. 

Cat Power – Moon Pix (1998)

It takes a true visionary to turn a drumbeat from a Beastie Boys hit, reverse it and turn it into an apathetic alt-folk burner. That’s what songwriter Chan Marshall of Cat Power is, and that’s what she does on the first track on “Moon Pix.”

But the star at the gravitational center of “Moon Pix” is “Metal Heart.” Its meandering guitar chords ring with the emotional warmth that Marshall seems to long for. The blaze that might just melt the callous, metal heart at the song’s center. It’s a soothing scarf in a snowstorm of emotionlessness and the realization that sometimes freezing is better than boiling.

“It must just be the colors and the kids that keep me alive,” Marshall sings on “Colors and The Kids.” “Cause I wanna go ride away to a January night.”

Gregory Alan Isakov – This Empty Northern Hemisphere (2009)

Sometimes I forget just how known Gregory Alan Isakov is. He’s got more Spotify monthly listeners than Jason Isbell, Pavement and Sonic Youth combined. But the beauty of his songwriting comes from the feeling that he knows you.

At moments on his breakout, atmospheric Americana record “This Empty Northern Hemisphere,” Isakov knows you through a lyric. Like on “Words,” where he sings, “Did you ever notice the way light means more than it did all day long?”

But most of all, he knows you through the feelings he can lure with a strum, or a subtly struck cymbal, or his one-of-a-kind baritone. 

Today, it feels like he understands me in winter. In an empty sea of snow I’ve never seen before, “This Empty Northern Hemisphere” is the wind knocking flakes from the tips of my desert-bred hair. Warm then, but warmer now.

It’s a desert outside and — still — I’m growing.