As I was driving around yesterday evening doing some errands with NPR on, as I am wont to do (please don’t hold it against me), a piece came on about songs that remind people of winter. Last summer NPR’s All Things Considered did a series on songs that remind people of summer and decided to do the same for winter. You know, the kind of songs that flood your mind with warm memories of another time. They pick a person, who may be well known or not, and ask them what their favorite winter song is.

The song chosen especially resonated with me because of a piece written here at TAC by Larry Kaufman just a couple days ago about why commercial music today is so terrible. Such a song, written in 1965, could not be produced today. Is there any song out there now, or in the last 10 years, that will be played in 46 years that evokes such feelings and memories, that so captures the time in which it was written? Maybe so for certain individuals, because music is so important to most kids going through what we now call adolescence. But on a more macro scale, I don’t think so.

If you are at all familiar with popular music of the last 50 years, you know that the title of this post is the title of a song by The Mommas and the Pappas. What a great, great song, especially for a native Californian who has been stuck in the Chicago suburbs for going on 12 years next spring. “All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey . . . .” Indeed.