186. Song No. 2,806: “Drinking Wine, Talking Art,” Kids These Days
All These Interruptions, 2004

Welcome back to one of my favorite albums and one of the all-time best winter records, as only a bunch of Canadian musicians could create the latter. It’s been entirely too long since I’ve publicly gushed about these guys and this album that I am dangerously close to posting about song by perfect song.

I’ve talked about how this album reminds me of the people who made college and everything after beautiful, memorable places to be, but I haven’t had a chance to rave about how it’s one of those albums that just feel like winter.

And of all the things college doesn’t really feel much like, winter is certainly among them. But I discovered All These Interruptions the semester before I got an iPod for Christmas and was still madly in honeymoon-stage-intensity love with it, which means it was my constant companion everywhere I went in the interminable, wintry weeks between fall and spring semester. I’m already way too prone to curating my own personal soundtrack in my head; having an album I was helplessly smitten with constantly piping directly into my ears as I found something new to love about it with every new play was just setting myself up for imprinting the songs of All These Interruptions all over winter forever, and thus giving the worst season at least one redemptive quality.

“Drinking Wine, Talking Art,” despite its deceptively chatty title, waits a full 2:13 of its total five-minute, six-second run time ’til the vocals come bursting through the lush and twinkly instrumentalization heralding their arrival. I’m already predisposed to love songs that handily soar past the four-minute mark, but the way this one lets its first half build and grow before cracking itself open has been giving me the most reliably constant chills for almost two decades now.

Bonus tidbit, to really date myself: Because I preferred to operate like all my favorite singers had stolen all of my best lines during my peak Insufferable Indie Snob reign, “Drinking Wine, Talking Art” was my MySpace display name for just the loooooongest time.