My Favorite Songs of 2010: #9

#9: 20 Years of Snow by Regina Spektor

20 Years of Snow, from Regina Spektor's 2006 Begin to Hope album, highlights her virtuosity with the piano. It is an exercise in musical turbulence, quite a trip to listen to. The song's narrative centers around the first twenty years of a woman's life, her father, and her present attitudes (or at least that's how I read it). Like Radiohead's Go to Sleep, it is a very exciting, stirring song, certain to increase the listener's pulse.

As with many songs I like, I imagine my own videos of it. One version has a young woman sweating in the hot Florida summertime while jogging. The scene transforms itself into a winter snowstorm, and she is bundled up struggling against the snow. Flashbacks from her childhood ensue, featuring her relationship with her father. Toward the song's end, its atonal nature and the cynical lyrics about strangers create a dank, dark scene of her moving around among sinister-looking men. And then she is back on the sweltering jogging trail, her outer appearance hiding the "20 years of snow" buried deep within her.

This is the sort of thing that comes from me listening to the same great songs repeatedly while piling up the miles running down roads in the hot, Florida summer: I tend to go off into flights of fantasy. But even if you just listen to the music of 20 Years of Snow for its own sake, this song kicks ass!