Song Analysis

Coming soon! In the meantime, read Tori’s quotes about the song.

"Summoned to the piano, this Russian music box round played me over and over til I was wrapped in a blanket with the memory of cinnamon apples on my tongue and boys that didn’t. ’We’ went back to where I felt no time - it was all happening again, presently." (Little Earthquakes songbook)

"This song I wrote about my dad. I’m really close to my dad even though we kinda see things differently a lot of the time. He was pretty old when I wrote this. It’s called Winter." (JJJFM - Australia - June 7, 1992)

“I wrote this song for my Dad when he was ill.” (Down Under the Pink bootleg, 1994)

"My father’s here tonight. I remember he took me for this walk in the mountains, and it was snowing and it got inside of my boots and made my feet cold. But I’ll never forget it because it was the first time in a long time that we had connected. I wrote this for him." (Tori’s intro to the song live in Ft Lauderdale in 1998)

“I was leeching off the men in my life; don’t get me wrong, they were leeching off me, but I didn’t like who I was. So my Dad and I were walking out in the old farm, my grandmother’s farm, she really wasn’t a nice person. Now my Dad, he’s like James Dean or Billy Graham, though there’s no real difference there. I was telling him how bad I felt cause of the first album being so bad and Dad said to me (he’d never said it before), ‘Tori Ellen, When are you going to accept you are good enough for you?’” (VH1 Storytellers — during the recording, that story wasn’t aired on TV sadly — October 24, 1998)

"[The ’White Horses’ are ] your dreams. That doesn’t really say it. Opportunities? Roads that you thought you would go down and haven’t experienced, and all these potential experiences are gone now. Those doors are closed. And imagination — the belief that your imagination can take you to places. The magical world having gone from your world, which to me there’s nothing more painful than that — when you can’t access your magical world. There was a moment when I thought I was too young to not be able to access that anymore. But I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of teenagers feel locked out of that world. They don’t know how to get back anymore because in trying to become an adult you feel like you have to circumcise the magical world." (Rolling Stone.com, December 18, 2009)