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Polydor | genius.com
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Folks, did you know that winter is the best season?
It’s got it all: its own specific colour palette of soothing silvers and sparkling whites, its own specific weather phenomenon (at least theoretically — dwellers of less drought-stricken landmasses, check your privilege something something snowflakes), its own specific overhyped and overrated holiday, and most pleasantly its own soundtrack.
Sleigh bells ring, as the song goes — are you listening?
Winter sounds like jaunty, square-edged ditties transposed directly from some Austenian dancehall to the spotless linoleon of shopping centres. Think basically all the incidental music from Love Actually.
And other seasons can proudly claim their own musical idiosyncrasies. Woodwinds for spring? Groundbreaking.
Symphonies of celebration and rebirth, of flowers springing from the soil and rivers babbling by, of sunbeams and birdsong and life, stretching back millennia to the beginning of recorded history, and likely much further.
But poor, complicated autumn has no corresponding soundfont.
It is popularly cited as a favourite among seasons. But nobody wants to record the conflict between hot and cold, for this conflict has a clear and inevitable winner. The gradient from the sleepless sweats of summer to the shivering frosts of winter is hardly marketable.
If autumn had its own soundtrack, I imagine it would sound something like James Blake.
There’s the intimate coziness of fluffy cardigans and snuggly scarves, and there’s a piercing chill that even the wooliest of wool cannot entirely block. There’s a hazy, uncertain warmth that spreads like a seasonal coffee beverage in the belly, and ebbs against the sharpness in the lungs.
And most ineffable, most indescribable, most untranslatable of all is the peverse sense of refreshment blowing in the breeze. Having thrown off the sticky, oppressive blanket of summer, the accommodating autumn leaves us feeling unburdened and energised even as the world is fading around us. It’s as if we have absorbed the sun’s festive yellows and nature’s rich greens for our own selfish and unknowable purposes, leaving in our wake skies of steely grey and oceans of rotting brown.
Boughs of guilty liberation rise queasily through the air, upturned bare branches sketching stark and irregular gridlines against the clouds. The wind whispers, a wraith haunting the woods, creaking and sighing through the boughs afraid that if it stops it may cease to exist altogether.
Chances are it won’t.
But James doesn’t strike me as one to play the odds.