Acoustic Winter

You know the feeling you get when the low winter sun reflects off frosted roads and fields . . . well, it exists right here, a place of crisply plucked guitar strings and thoughts trapped like leaves in frozen puddles. Seasick Steve sets the tone, reigning in his firebrand blues for "Walkin Man", and paving the way for Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, who pick a route down "Memory Lane" like they're in dire need of a hot toddy. Still, there's a hint of spring in Randy Newman's "Feels Like Home" . . . . . . but it looks like the chill is going to last through our Next Steps.

There's a certain hyper-dramatic hysteria in David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things" but, slowed down and covered by Au Revoir Simone, the track seems shrouded in wintry shadows. Jakob Dylan says he was "schooled in the tyranny of nature's plans" on "Will It Grow", adding "damn this cold!" but the track is sprightly enough to cast a ray of warm light over our selection, and there's more than a pinch of Jakob's dad in the voice and harmonica of young Pete Molinari, singing "One Stolen Moment". Fred Neil lays his dark baritone on winter's shimmer in Deep Cuts.

If you've not yet met Fred Neil, winter's probably as good a time as any to make his acquaintance — he's the folk-song writer who penned "Everybody's Talkin'" (famously covered by Harry Nilsson), here wrenching every last ounce of heartbreak from "December's Dream". English folkies Show of Hands generate such a warmth of sound over "Cold Frontier" that the nip in the air starts to lose its sting, and to round things off, Michigan man Chris Bathgate signals change on "The Last Wine of Winter".

"The winter's cheek flushed . . . and smiled quietly." That's how the great, but doomed, early-20th-century poet Edward Thomas described a still, bright winter's day, and we'll wager that his words will resonate once you've immersed yourself in our Acoustic Winter Essentials. Sure, these tracks are all tainted with some aspect of nature's darkest, deadest season — from Cloud 9's "A Great Misery" to Calexico's "Slowness" and Abbe May's "Storm" — but the glow of a warm melody is always there to keep the worst ravages of the cold at bay. In fact, this list belongs (again in the words of Edward Thomas) to "a season of bliss unchangeable".