When It Rains, It Snows

Wet, then wetter. Cold, then colder. Dense grey skies for months on end. Welcome to winter in the Great Pacific Northwest. Located at the south end of the Willamette Valley, Eugene winters are described as "mild" by Easterners because of the absence of sub-zero temperatures and the scarcity of snow. That is, until they move here. Then they quickly become familiar with the ugly underbelly of "mild".

"When the rain comes,
They run and hide their heads,
They might as well be dead,
When the rain comes,
When the raaaaaaaain comes."

You know this as "Rain", the quintessential rain song by The Beatles. Thank you, John Lennon, for your pithy words about the topic of rain. Paul McCartney would never write such downer lyrics unless, maybe, the topic was love gone bad. John, on the other hand, sounds like a guy from the Pacific Northwest. I guess Liverpool and Eugene have something in common weatherwise.

Come to think of it, there are plenty of songs about rain. Other than love songs, it's hard to think of a topic that has inspired as many tunes as the weather, especially rain and its friendly counterpart, the sun. But this post is about rain. Songwriters demonstrate little interest in the less temperate forms of precipitation: hail, sleet and snow. I invite you to suggest a logical reason for this.

Ever wonder why there are so many rain songs? Because when it rains, songwriters stay inside and fiddle around, like everyone else, but they do their fiddling with actual musical instruments. And like everyone else, rain stimulates boredom, so they write about what's in front of them. For songwriters, the struggle for new material is ongoing and one's imagination only gets them so far. In other words, songwriters see rain, get depressed by rain, get bored by the rain which leads, in turn, to writing about rain. Sometimes they write about rain and love at the same time. For example,

"Listen to the rhythm of the pouring rain,
Tellin' me just what a fool I've been."
Bla bla bla

If you don't know this song, "Rhythm of the Rain", check it out. It's a lovely piece of early 60's pop built, like most songs of that era (and most eras) on very little substance, but it still made most folks feel good in a melancholy yet upbeat sort of way.

There are so many songs about rain that you can buy a compilation cd with over 20 songs by various artists on that topic. And this scarcely scratches the surface of songs about rain. Not surprisingly, the common denominator of these songs, other than rain itself, is that they all convey some degree of melancholy-ness, ranging from drearily, depressingly sad to somewhere slightly north of ambivalent, as in the aforementioned "Rhythm of the Rain".



The Willamette Valley is experiencing a bit of snow at the moment. Quite a bit, in fact. Folks around here are ill-prepared for snow. They drive at a crawl if they drive at all and school officials can be depended upon to close the schools at the sight of the first snowflake. When the snow retreats, the rain appears, followed by volleys of back-and-forth precipitation changes. Dueling precipitation, weather wars.

Other weather variants that sometimes receive the attention of songwriters are hurricanes, cyclones and lightning. Remember "Lightnin' Strikes"? A happy song about lightning and love, a divine combination. Songwriters just can't steer clear of the love/weather tandem. Then, of course, there are the songs about wind. There's even a hilarious mockumentary, "The Mighty Wind", which isn't really about wind but is all about music---the folk music scene of the 60's.

Then there are songs which trick you into thinking they are about rain but really aren't, like Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35". Why he decided to give this song (you remember, "....everybody must get stoned") that particular name remains a mystery, at least to me.

I was 16 years old the first time I entered a recording studio with my first band, "Spectrum", and we recorded two songs, one of which was "One More Rainy Day". Yup, it was melancholy. And not very good, but hey, we were kids.

Maybe it's time for someone to break the boring, predictable cycle of rain, which leads to sad feelings, which leads to rain songs. I volunteer to be the first to write a happy song about rain. Stay tuned. This might take a while.