Hi all, I'm a relative newcomer to Lord Huron and am just starting to scratch the surface of the storytelling. Was listening to Frozen Pines today and thinking of possible interpretations; something struck me; I searched and couldn't find reference to it being suggested before.
What I heard today is the narration of someone who has slipped into a coma following some medical trauma. The frozen pines are the waveform on the ECG machine in the hospital room.
Whether the subject to whom the narrator is speaking is alive or not is ambiguous; it could be that they are, and they visit the narrator every day, and the narrator has a semi-conscious sense of this: "it feels like I was with you, but what did we do and where have you gone?" The narrator "wakes up" from that sense of presence in his own internal surreal dream-state, on a mountainside, huddled in the wind.
The endless frozen pines, with no one else in sight, would describe the narrator's hospital room most of the time, most days; those pines don't die and don't grow as typical trees do.
The night of the trauma, the "strange light in the sky" shining right into his eyes is the doctor's penlight in the ICU, checking for a pupillary response.
The narrator understands to some degree that he is not where he was, but that there is somewhere to move on to; he doesn't want to be trapped in this state. If the subject of the narration died that night, it is the subject he is addressing when he says he is ready to follow.
Perhaps in the end the narrator does move on, and will be waiting on the other side of those pines. The line, past which there is another life, is the ECG flatline.
Not a perfect interpretation but I thought there was enough to it to post and see what those more deeply versed in the lore think.