Winter Trees

"Winter Trees" is one of the purest expressions of the Staves' early sound — three voices, minimal instrumentation, a melancholy so clean it feels almost medicinal. The song moves slowly through its verses like someone walking through an empty landscape in low light, each step deliberate, the acoustic guitar tracking something fragile and essential. The harmony here is stacked in a way that creates overtones the ear registers before the brain does — the sisters' voices occupy a frequency relationship that seems to produce a fourth implied voice somewhere above their heads. Lyrically winter trees work as the obvious but not trite metaphor for stripped-down emotional states, for the period when all the covering is gone and what remains is the underlying structure of a thing. There's no resolution offered, no warmth at the song's end to redeem the cold — this is a piece that simply inhabits its season fully. The restraint is the point. It's the kind of song that reveals different things depending on where you're standing in your own life when you encounter it. Ideal for the specific melancholy of November afternoons when dark comes early.