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Early Winter
Artist: Gwen Stefani
Album: The Sweet Escape
Year: 2006
♥: My Drama kids presented their music videos today. In four groups, there were two modern pop songs (including "Payphone," which will always have a smiley place in my heart), a rap song, and Gwen Stefani's "Rich Girl." I've heard all four of these songs about five hundred THOUSAND times in the past month as the kids edited their videos and sang along (seriously, the amount of times I caught myself humming the "I'm at a paaaayphone trying to phoooone home" line in the hallway...sigh) but today's listening had that little presentation high, when everything's come together, and it all sounds and seems a little sparklier up on the big screen (or, cough, the SmartBoard). "Rich Girl," in particular, had a certain sheen -- but for me, I think, it was a nostalgic one.

Gwen Stefani's solo albums were both released at the beginning of December, and any time I hear a track from either, I am brought rapidly back to end-of-fall/beginning-of-winter 2004 or 2006. Both are emotion-filled, transitional times; a select couple tracks are memory-bombs. "Cool" may have hit the airwaves in Spring 2005, but to me it will always be December 2004, after I received Love. Angel. Music. Baby. from a friend as a Christmas gift; feeling it in my bones, one of those perfect little pop gems, and genuinely beautiful, I think. 

"Early Winter" was the only song I really liked from The Sweet Escape. I listened to it nonstop for a few days leading up to my earlier-scheduled exams, studying frantically for Astronomy and Theatre History and relieved that my backstage class was finished; excited about Christmas, but like really excited, okay, actually admitting I was excited, which was something little Goth Jill had never really done. "Early Winter" reminds me of that blissful feeling you get when the semester is almost done, you're almost there, and the entire library is humming in solidarity as everyone tries to finish papers and study guides and cram in one last coffee date before we all headed home for the holidays.

Nostalgia, yep.
But even though most of my school friends, from cegep and from university, have scattered themselves around the globe,
I hear a song like this,
and I remember when we were all together, still excited for the next couple years, in the thick of our undergraduate degrees, happy and young and ready for December.

Not everything has changed.