The Long Winters

(The Long Winters [L-R]: Jonathan Rothman (guitar, keys), Eric Corson (bass), John Roderick (guitar, vocals, piano), Nabil Ayers (drums).)

“Listen,” Gilles said, “you can do this only so long through ignorance. Reality comes to everybody if they stay long enough… Learn that every day will be different; some days you will be ‘brave,’ and some days you cannot. Don’t punish yourself with it. It’s normal. Cut down your emotional output. You can carry on indefinitely if you stop thinking so much…” His advice was to come back to me many times and I see that day now without any sense of shame. It was as if a door had opened, slowly at first, to a new understanding… So began the long winter retreat of emotion.”

—British war correspondent Anthony Loyd on surviving the war in Bosnia, My War Gone By, I Miss It So (1999)

One fine summer day in 2004, John Roderick—singer, primary songwriter, founder and agitator-in-chief for the Seattle, Wash., arts/rock collective The Long Winters—put himself to bed. And he rarely ventured beyond its cozy confines for the next nine months.

The punchline to this seemingly abstruse joke? He’d barely even taken notice of the unavoidable fact that he’d fallen but couldn’t get up.

“By March 2005, I realized that more or less I had been in bed the entire time,” Roderick recalls over lunch one afternoon at an out-of-the-way French bistro in Seattle’s Belltown district. “I’d been working, mind you—I had all these workbooks piled up around me, I’d been writing, reading all these books I’d been meaning to get to. I got a book about the Hundred Years’ War: it was 900 pages long, and in June of 2004 I said to myself ‘I’m gonna start reading that book.’ And it’s one of those books that makes you start reading other books, so I eventually had four more books on the subject going at the same time. And, honestly, I looked around one day and couldn’t understand how it had gotten to be 2005.”

Given Roderick’s headfirst approach to life and tendency to occasionally stretch a metaphor to make a point, it’s tempting to believe he’s exaggerated the state of his circumstances for dramatic effect. But a dinner in Seattle with Brit-rock up-and-comers Keane evidently served as Roderick’s wakeup call, jolting him back to life over the course of a single night away from the house.

“That meal was pretty formative,” Roderick chuckles as if to himself. “These guys were young, coming through town on tour, having a ‘major label’ kind of experience—limo rides everywhere—and I was sitting down at the table with them like Will Oldham if he had weighed 220 pounds! My beard was down to here”—Roderick points emphatically to his chest—“there were swallows living in it, and everyone was suddenly solicitous when they’d call me on the phone. ‘How you doing, John, everything OK?’” he imitates in an overly bright voice, the air around him ringing with mock concern. “And I was pretty cheery; it wasn’t like I was hiding under the covers or anything. But that dinner made me think ‘Whoa! Time to take a bath! Time to cut my hair!’”