This piano ballad was the fourth single from American singer-songwriter Tori Amos' solo debut album, Little Earthquakes. The song was Amos' first Top 40 single in the UK.
Amos explained this song concerning thoughts about her father and failed aspirations to Rolling Stone: Said Amos: "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."
In her 1998 VH1 Storytellers special, Amos explained how the song was inspired by a conversation with her father. She said: "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?'"
In her 2005 autobiography, Piece By Piece, Amos described how the meaning of the song has changed for her over the years: "It's always shifting. When I sing 'Winter' now, I don't necessarily get the same pictures I did on the last tour or the tour before or the tour before or the tour before. When I was writing that song, I was considering a relationship between a girl and her father, or a grandfather. Or any male who held that space. Because as we know, some fathers don't hold that space. My perspective isn't always about a girl and her father. 'When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do?' There was a moment for me when those lyrics were referencing Kevyn Aucoin. Especially when he died, that was my need. The song allows me the space to have my perception of it as I go through my changes, and yet I still hold the integrity of a girl and her father when that songs enters my body in live performance. But I, as Tori, will feel what I feel, and see the pictures I see, and the songs have always allowed me that as long as I retain their DNA integrity."
Sometimes the song reminds Amos of her own parenting missteps and the work she has to do to maintain a healthy relationship with her daughter, who was born in 2000. "I will do something, say something to Natashya, and I'll just realize I have created a space that I did not want to create for her to walk into," she explained. "Say she was very naughty and I said something like (and I am cringing as I write this), 'Because you did this, this is why Mommy's going to London this weekend.' So then she thinks that when Mommy leaves it's because she's naughty. I saw that happen once, and it was as if a thousand prisms were shattered - I began to see in my own being how the tape plays, what I hear when somebody makes a rhetorical move like that. I did something that I'm going to have to deal with and work with now a lot, whenever I leave her.
So when I sing 'Winter,' sometimes now I see a girl walking over that hill with a mommy. Yet the pictures can still be of my Poppa, and my father. It's not always an either / or when I'm singing a song live. I can liken it much more to snapshots or Polaroids that I can flip through in a book, that tug and pull on my emotions with every turn of a phrase. But now other experiences affect me when I sing, 'When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do?'"
The music video, directed by Cindy Palmano, features the singer dancing with kids in daisy costumes. She climbs through an opening in the wall and finds a white piano, which she begins to play.
This was featured in the 2001 documentary 5 Girls.
