I liked this song, but had never heard of Dead Man Winter and never bothered to learn more. When I decided to include it here, I did some checking in. DMW is actually Trampled by Turtles frontman Dave Simonett, who apparently retreated to a little town in Minnesota to recover from a marriage that didn’t last.
“ ‘Red Wing Blue Wing’ is a small, incomplete snapshot of a year spent living in a small town in southern Minnesota,” he says. “It’s kind of a look at the romanticism of small town life versus the reality of inserting oneself into a fairly settled-in community that isn’t really used to outsiders, so to speak. It has a happy ending, though. By the end of my time there, I genuinely felt like a citizen and had grown to enjoy the place.”
That’s it. I can loll around in the closing organ swell indefinitely. Sometimes I will replay it a time or two in the car for no particular reason than to hear it end again. Go ahead, try it.
kevdonahue.com 