Too Cold Outside
I can remember the exact moment when I started the song “Too Cold Outside”. It was in December, too many years ago to feel comfortable saying, and I was home alone vacuuming the floor. The melody and the first line came uninvited into my mind as one thing. As if a filling in my teeth was picking up a radio signal from the rusted-out 1972 Chevy Nova passing by the house. I don’t recall what might have inspired it, what I had been thinking about or listening to, besides the comforting hum of the vacuum, or why the subject unfolded as it did. I do know that I wasn’t attempting to write a song to pitch to anyone. It was just a message, an echo, something floating up to the surface. By the time the floor was clean the song was mostly finished too.
I believe that a lot of what I write is my subconscious making itself present, speaking in symbols and imagery in an attempt to reveal something about me to myself. Old wounds, hidden feelings, suppressed desires, new perspectives. That kind of thing. All very self indulgent to be sure, and not the perfect technique for most co-writes, but usually creatively satisfying and often revealing. Sitting in so many rooms for so much time alone, and with so many different co-writers, has made me more than an attentive listener for that voice. I’m now habitually fascinated by what I need to say. On those occasions where that takes the shape of a song that I think might be moving, enjoyable or entertaining to someone else, all the better.
Is “Too Cold Outside” one of those? Maybe. It’s unashamedly Tom Waits/Harry Nilsson. Again, not my intention, just what wouldn’t stop feeling right. I recorded it on lo-fi equipment and the synth-violin sound is painfully awful. But there is something about the recording that is, to me, endearingly fragile and hauntingly strange enough that I haven’t felt compelled to “do it better”. I may.
Meanwhile here it is. Unfortunately it’s even “colder” outside, far colder, today than it was when I wrote it. If “Nick” had been a real guy he would be dead by now. He wasn’t. He isn’t. He’s something still staying safe at home inside me. And happily, in spite of the worrisome temperature of the world and the presence of metal detectors seeming retrospectively quaint, Nick is being better to himself these days.
