Winter Wonderland: Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow

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Nick Cave is an amazing songwriter and storyteller, always creating haunting tales of death, addiction and general human malice. He's been making records for twenty years or more, and was named one of Paste Magazine's 100 Greatest Living Songwriters a few years back, something I strongly agree with, though I'd like to have seen him higher than #90.

This song is generally believed to be yet another song using snow as metaphor for cocaine. This is probably quite likely considering this album (which is also probably the one I genuinely enjoy the most of his) was the first Cave made after getting off drugs himself. The names he mentions in the song, Mona, Mary, John, Mark, Matthew, are supposed to signify people he lost due to drugs. The metaphor is brought to life, imagining friends slowly being lost to this tremendous blizzard, and slowly losing yourself under that same weight of heavy snow.