"Apple Butter" Music Video

We are exiting the winter season, and it's hard. Winter is one of my favorites, in the same way that the key of D minor is my favorite. I relish the quiet, the melancholy, the deep sense of waiting for what might be, and what can no longer be ever again. On our regular path through the woods that we walk every day with the dogs, what used to be a portal of snow and ice with only blotches of pine green is reduced to a thick mud, a few last sheets of ice, and a stubble of last year's leaves jutting through.

It's time to give it up.

We're exiting, too, the season of Winter Hare. Every record has a run time. Sure, we'll continue to play the songs, sell the record, make more merch. But there is a time when a record feels like it has truly wrung itself out from the spotlight and takes its place in the back catalog. When it's time for something new. When, in this case, spring has sprung. And it's hard, because those songs have become more of a comfort than a poignancy.

It feels right to close this chapter in a big way. Today, we released our last music video for Winter Hare. Shot last spring in Pittsburgh, PA with our filmmaker friend, Alyssa Pearson and her crew at Steel City Cinema in an old warehouse, we felt everything in every which way before we released the record. It was pretty special and important healing work, too, as Alyssa was also a special person and friend to Tom (who the entire album is about). It was mutual grief placed into art, and not all friends get to do that together. We have gratitude in spades to our friend Ann (Tom's wife), too, who lent us the footage you see in the background of this video. It's hard to believe that the three of us used to all sit around a kitchen table in Ohio with this man we loved, and whose face can only now be footage on a warehouse wall. The last scrapes of winter melting away.

When we wrote this song, "Apple Butter," we weren't entirely sure what that line meant-- "Now I'm spreading this thin like apple butter." But after living three winters without this person who used to be a father to me, it makes a lot more sense. We have a single jar of apple butter left in our refrigerator at the moment, a homemade gift from the Goodell's across the river. Apple butter was my absolute favorite winter treat as a kid, and still is now. I savor it on every bready surface I can find-- waffles, crackers, and sometimes even on apples themselves. Getting to the end of the jar feels like getting to the end of the goodness of a season. And so as I would pile it up lusciously in December, by March I'm rationing it out like it's the Great Depression. It's the perfect metaphor for grief. Because as much as I know that there is an end, as much as I know that I need to just give it up, wash out the jar, and move on to the next season-- to give up the grief is to in many ways give up the last presence of a person. It's to take the storehouse you made of them when they were alive, all those preserved memories that are now painful to consume, and to relinquish them to their new keeper: to death. Giving up grief comes with guilt, which comes with the responsibility of moving on without a person. And so, we keep reaching back in the jar for what was. We write songs, we look at photos, we re-live it all again and again.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

It may come to be that in a few days or a few years, we find yet another jar tucked in the back of the pantry. We may open it and savor that grief again. And that would be okay. This business of grieving is not linear. It makes no promises to play nice or to be folded up neatly for when we feel like dealing with it. But in its duration and surprise appearances, there is a long path of our life unrolling before us, and whether we like it or not, the season is changing. No matter how comforting that grief has become, new songs are being sung, and spring is sprung.

But first, one last drink of winter. Presenting our music video, "Apple Butter."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oknHevKyCTA