Listen the Snow is Falling by Yoko Ono

It was 80 degrees in LA when I recorded this song. It was a Yoko kind of snow I envisioned - the snow of both awareness and obliteration. Snow as peace, as drug, as ash, as nuclear fallout. Snow as the dust that falls on my gas heater each day and burns off each morning. It stings my nose with the smoke of a thousand mite-sized fires.

I collected pine boughs and red berried branches. I passed a man carrying a gas can who said I looked like Easter not Christmas in my sun hat. He handed me a stray white flower apologizing that he was no florist. Just a rotund Santa in gym shorts and a stained grey t-shirt. When I got home a neighbor had left a bouquet of baby’s breath on our doorstep. I used to hate those flowers in their stiff plastic collars filling the spaces between red roses. I always threw them away. Like packaging peanuts. But alone they are perfect and they spill from the piano mantle like a snow drift, an avalanche. Beauty is maybe just context.

I say I want peace, but the only peace I know is just like snow. A sheet over a cadaver. The corporeal rot remains beneath the illusion of pristine. And maybe that’s why we all love snow. We get to hold on to the mess, the drama, the gritty humanness while we experience purity for a day, two. I want the look of peace, but not what it truly means: utter erasure.

I recorded this song in all the wrong ways. I played it straight into my garageband with only the computer mic. I made layers without headphones so that each successive layer is saturated with the ones before & create this horrible almost flanging sound. I used the “telephone” effect. I let the siren live on at the end because I liked the take. I love doing things the wrong way. It’s so rare that we get to do that in life. Even as artists I notice a slow and steady conformity set in as musicians become legitimate. I do it too. How else would we fit into the font, size & waveform of streaming services. I rebel in minute ways - like refusing to follow a recipe. In the end I am just like everyone else - I want to belong.

I think snow is so appealing for its blank canvas & its ephemerality. What would you paint on the world if it were wiped clean. What intrepid step would you take. What footprint would you leave. What mistakes would you make if you knew it would all melt away the next day.