Songfacts®:

• Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, who died in 2022 at 57, was an adventure seeker always looking for some fun... even at 6 in the morning!
  
  The band's guitarist, Gary Lee Conner, explained in the book Lanegan that "Winter Song" originated when Mark showed up at his door at 6 a.m. and ordered him to start drinking beer. He rounded up their other bandmates - Van Conner (Gary Lee's brother) and Barrett Martin - and they drove all over Seattle. By early afternoon, his bandmates had had enough, but Lanegan was still on the hunt, so they dropped him off at a strip club called the Lusty Lady.
  
  "That night, I went back home and wrote 'Winter Song,'" Gary Lee Conner explained. "And that's always been one of my favorite songs of the Screaming Trees. My wife – she was actually my girlfriend at the time – was in New York, and suggested that I write a song like Cheap Trick's 'Downed.' The day of the craziness and that song were kind of inspiration for 'Winter Song' – it has a similar descending thing. So, I wrote that and the next day I showed Mark, and he liked it a lot."
• "Winter Song" is part of Sweet Oblivion, the sixth Screaming Trees album and their second on a major label (Epic). By this time, the grunge movement was in full swing, and bands from the Seattle area were in high demand. Screaming Trees got some attention by association but remained little known. Many discovered them through the Singles soundtrack, which includes their song "Nearly Lost You," also on Sweet Oblivion. What they lacked in popularity they made up for in influence; they started making music in the mid-'80s that impacted folks like Kurt Cobain. As you can grok from Gary Lee Connor's story about this song, it wasn't always easy being a Screaming Tree. They released one more album and broke up in 2000.
• The opening line, "Jesus knocking on my door," was originally "Lanegan knocking on my door," a reference to Mark Lanegan waking up Gary Lee Conner in the early hour.
• This was a popular live song for Screaming Trees. They often performed it when they toured in 1996 with Josh Homme on guitar. Mark Lanegan would later work with Homme in Queens Of The Stone Age; tracks he sang on include "In The Fade" and "I Think I Lost My Headache."