"A Pile of Dead Leaves and a Moon the Color of Bone"

Songs for a storm-beaten November night--one where the hatches really need to be battened down and where the sound of the rain pounding on the windows makes you really glad you are tucked up in bed.

1. Late November -- Sandy Denny: "The methods of madness, the pathos and the sadness/God help you all, the insane and wise."

2. November -- Tom Waits: "No prayers for November to linger longer"

3. The Lost Coast -- The Grey Eye Glances: "Later on at the lighthouse/We were warned we should be careful/By waves that shot above us/We were told there was a hurricane/That came ashore each evening"

4. Everybody Knows -- Echo and the Bunnymen: "You're putting the no in November"

5. On the Radio -- Regina Spektor: "And on the radio/You hear November Rain/That solo's awful long/But it's a good refrain"

6. Saying Nothing -- Thea Gilmore: "Here's hoping that you thought to pull your window down cos the/Dogs are still barking Debussey in rounds"

6. Winter -- Joshua Radin: "Thinkin' of winter"

7. Mr November -- The National

A few of these were in my head anyway when I was thinking of November songs--Late November, The Lost Coast (which opens with, "Early November, north of San Francisco"), and Saying Nothing (which begins with, "Enter my November boy/With eyes like the sea"). Others were rediscovered when browsing the iTunes store for songs with November in the title. The rest resurfaced after a tireless search for "November lyrics -Waits -Denny -Wyclef -Guns -Roses."

My ad hoc topic-based playlists are still hugely hampered by iTunes's failure to let me search for words appearing in song lyrics I have tireless entered by hand for several hundred of my favourite songs; nor did a Google search turn up any workarounds, other than a plugin for Macs. Briefly, I considered pasting the lyrics of my favourite songs into the "comments" field in iTunes, which is searchable, but then I discovered that would only allow me to input the first verse or so of most songs, which is no use. Even more briefly, I toyed with the idea of going through my favourite songs (200 of them, say) and adding keywords to the "comments" field. But that would just be madness, clearly...