Freezing Cold (Bon Iver - Skinny Love)

Bon Iver - Skinny Love

If you've ever heard of Bon Iver, it's likely that you first heard of him as that guy who disappeared into a cabin in the wilderness to write that ice-cold and fire-warm breakup album about some girl named Emma. Or maybe you hadn't heard of him until he won some Grammy's a few years later, and you thought that his name was Bonny Bear. For Emma, Forever Ago has, for whatever reason, become a staple in the Indie Music Canon, largely because of the success of the lead single "Skinny Love". It has also become a staple in the Wintertime Sadness Canon because of how sad and spare it all sounds. It's heavy and mopey and lovely and tragic and very, very woodsy.

I first heard "Skinny Love" and the entire For Emma record in November 2008. I was 21 at the time, and while I had exactly zero heartbreaks to speak of, I found myself unexpectedly living in my own cabin in the wilderness in Uptown Harrisburg. I was freshly out of college and my friends and I found this gigantic, old, cavernous home on Maclay Street. We were all new to the activity of looking for homes on Craigslist, which means that we didn't think to ask questions like "What is the heating situation like in this house?"

There was no real heating situation, as it turns out.

We soon learned that there was a door in our basement that led to some unfinished construction, and sitting among stray strands of insulation was a giant oil drum, tucked away, echoing with emptiness. My roommates and I put our money together to fill the drum with oil, and it cost us nearly $500. That's a lot of money by most standards, but in 2008, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to a few recent college graduates, it seemed like its own mortgage. We paid it anyway, but even then, we used the heat sparingly, spending most of our nights shivering in our beds, on the wet mat outside of the shower, in the kitchen making sandwiches. Two weeks later, the oil drum was dry already, and we wondered if our first winter spent together would also be our last, on account of death by frostbite.

Instead, we huddled in the basement, because it had no drafty windows. My roommates and I would each take a sofa, or an armchair, or floor space, and surround ourselves with an orchestra of space heaters, oftentimes falling asleep in the warmth of our den. I would wake up early, refusing to emerge from my bundle of blankets, and I would listen to music, often For Emma, Forever Ago on my iPod as my roommates still slept. And that is how I survived my first adult winter, surrounded by my friends, seeing our breath, a miraculous sign of life.

Listen below.