Winter

Directed by: Cindy Palmano
From the album: Little Earthquakes (1992)
Atlantic Records/East West

With its minimalist layout —white then black background — "Winter" is very close to Tori’s first music video by Cindy Palmano, "Silent All These Years". Here, Tori goes the piano and gets back to her childhood feelings.

Full article coming soon. In the meantime, read Tori’s and Cindy Palmano’s quotes about the video.

"I still have that piano, that little blue piano. My mom and dad have it. Um... Cindy and I wanted to... make this sort of part two to ’Silent All These Years’. So it was a variation on the same theme. Casting the children was really good fun. Cindy had a little boy at the time. He’s a big boy now. But I think this really inspired her to bring... little critters in that had, you know, the charm and the cheekiness that Buster had. I don’t know if they went to the same school. But working with them was, I think, important, ’cause it helped me to be able to move from woman to a young girl, which I needed to do in this video. Obviously, the story is about her girl and her father.

So... I must say, I remember coming out in, you know, a collared sweater, because Karen Binns, the stylist, thought, ’Well, yeah. I mean, child, woman, girl, it all works in a sweater.’ And Cindy said, ’What in the world is she in?’ And Karen said, ’Well, I love the material.’ And Cindy said, ’Well, do something to it, Karen.’ And she said, ’Girl, I’m gonna push knit in a way you ain’t never seen knit pushed.’ And Cindy, I think, was thrilled by Karen’s ability. Karen Binns is one of my closest friends and she is the stylist that I’ve been with since the beginning. Cindy introduced us. Cindy also brought in the make-up artist Lesley Chilkes, with whom I’ve worked more than with anybody else in the world. She is also a very close friend.

And I think there was a real... a bonding with the women on this, being able to... kind of, um, open up about the relationship that they had with somebody, whether it was their real father or somebody that they kind of looked to to hold that space, or what they wished their father had been. I remember Cindy really needing me to kind of cross a line back in time of the disappointment that you faced growing up, and to be able to sing about that in this last bit of the video. I filmed this in the end. Sometimes, you film you close-ups in the beginning because you look better, let’s face it. But Cindy didn’t want me to look better. She wanted me to be able to get to that place. And it took me being with the children and remembering and there were a lot of tears. I’ll be honest. So that by the time we reached this bit, Lesley had to re-do my make-up, and after some hugs, we filmed this... last birth." (Fade to Red, "China" audio commentary by Tori)

Really Deep Thoughts: The scenes with the children are wonderful.

Cindy Palmano: She adores children. Children adore her. That’s a really nice thing, actually. It’s quite rare.

RDT: Did Tori have the bell-bottom look before, or did she come up with this for the video?

CP: It wasn’t us, it was the stylist, Karen Binns, who was fantastic. That was her look. She and Tori went and made that look. I just fed colors that I was interested in. They made the look. I think it was just to do with the nostalgia, because "Winter" is about her father. It’s a nostalgic song and certainly that’s the way I interpreted it, so that it would look timeless. It does look a bit timeless, that video. It could have been shot at the same time as Sesame Street. It has a Sesame Street feel to me. It’s very simple.
(Really Deep Thoughts fanzine #4)