I woke up this morning and ventured outside to find Norwich decidedly wintry. Granted, it’s normally pretty cold here anyway, but today it felt cold. Maybe that’s what I get for deciding to do a food shop at eight in the morning. I was shivering like it was December, but maybe that’s also what I get for only donning a T-shirt and hoody as defenders against the cold. Regardless, I wasn’t living in September anymore, and the feeling that often creeps over me in the winter months was stretching itself towards me as I passed through the empty streets. The winter season always has me feeling a certain way, mostly sentimental and nostalgic for the winter months of my childhood. As soon as I sense winter around the corner, the mood descends upon me like snowfall, and I can’t help but shiver at its familiarity. As I’ve grown older the feeling has generally grown more potent, and each year something happens which adds itself to the tower of memories already established. It’s a feeling I’ve come to appreciate.

Released: 2011                                  Label: Run For Cover Records
Variant: 2nd press /500                   Purchased from: Banquet Records

Winter Forever is a record tied to one of those memories in particular, but it exists elsewhere in the halls of my memory. The instance I associate most with the record is seeing snow for the first time in years. For a number of years, from the end of high school to the end of college I remember it snowing very rarely in Lancashire. When I was growing up there it snowed every year; I used to long for canceled school days and sledding weekends. Both of these childhood wants grew to be increasingly scarce as I moved through secondary school, and less so when moving onto high school. I blame global warming. Then one year, as I sat in my college classroom, it began to snow – hard – and continued to do so. It was like something out of a movie, and all of those childhood dreams of sledding and snowball fights came rushing back in a white wave of nostalgic needs. I felt that same sense of childhood wonder that I had when I used to go to the park with my father and sled, or when I walked through the fields with my family, wrapped up from the windchill.

I had my headphones on during the bus ride home that day, and I was listening to Seahaven’s debut LP for the entirety of the journey, staring out of the window on the top deck at fields I hadn’t seen covered in snow since I was seven.  Everything was white, and the snow danced past that window like magic. I remember the feeling, which would have transcended youthful joy if not for my adolescent pessimism. I knew the weather was fleeting, and that in a matter of hours, or days, the fields would be back to normal, and all we’d have of the winter was its cold. As such, I tried to enjoy that bus ride, eyes fixated on the outside, noticing every detail that the weather wrought. I consider those details heightened by the presence of Winter Forever, in that temporary winter. Now, whenever the climate does allow me to see snow, I listen to this record, because it takes me back to that moment, those warm winter emotions. Seahaven’s debut record is one for the winter. I save its follow-up Reverie Lagoon for the summer.