Songfacts®:

• "Winter Kills" is one of the songs Alison Moyet brought to the table when she teamed with Vince Clarke to form Yazoo in 1981 after he left Depeche Mode. She wrote about the song's meaning on her website: "I wrote this when I was fresh to Yazoo. There was part of me that felt so alien in the world that everyone else seemed foreign. I was fascinated and somewhat appalled by the notion of romance.
  
  I felt like I mimicked social mores. I was performing my connections and all the time wondering how people became what they were becoming. The common and garden freaks. It was those that gravitated keenly to me that bothered me the most. They inspired my resentment. I was a tricksy misfit who rucked readily. I kept intimacy at a comfortable distance. Crushes inspired my ire. 'Winter Kills' is callous Alf."
  
  "Alf" is Moyet's nickname.
• Moyet wrote this song on piano - she says her slow songs are written on piano and faster ones on guitar. She recorded her piano part for the song, which Vince Clarke then processed and added to a drum track he programmed to create the backing music.
• "Winter Kills" is part of the first Yazoo album, Upstairs At Eric's (the title is a reference to Eric Radcliffe, who owned the studio where they recorded it and did production work on the album). Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke teamed up because he needed a vocalist for his song "Only You." When they recorded it, it became clear they had something special with the combination of Moyet's deep, emotive vocals and Clarke's synthesizer magic, so they made a whole album. They're personalities clashed, so after one more album they split up, with Clarke going on to form Erasure and Moyet going solo.