The windows in my apartment have been shut, an act that is irreversible and signals what I knew was bound to happen. Fall decided to come after all, and winter is beginning to rear its head, and I am waiting out what will probably be a few years until the landlord turns on our heat. So while we’re clinging onto Kleenex and cleaning the cough drops off the shelves, we have to keep company with songs for fall. These songs, some new and some old, have kept me warm over certain chilly months in ways that not even wood paneling and a glass of bourbon could.

The National — “Fake Empire.” I was never too big a fan of this album, but there is a certain fit between this song and carving pumpkins. Granted, I have never carved a pumpkin, or even looked at a pumpkin while listening to this song, but I can imagine the exact texture of pumpkin pulp in my hands when I listen to this song.

Leadbelly — “In the Pines.” There are a lot of old blues songs that are right at home in the foggy months of fall and winter, but the story conveyed in this traditional folk song will make you feel a little bit more grateful for where you’re shiverin’ the whole night through.

Menomena — “Wet and Rusting.” Ah, yes, the intrinsic longing of fall. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want someone to come over and use a heavy down comforter. The song has enough energy to move around a bit, but it furls its eyebrows all the time and is commendable in its acknowledgment of futility.

Karen Dalton — “A Little Bit of Rain.” Last week I was playing Karen Dalton’s album at work on a rainy day. At least 12 customers asked what was playing, and two of them even bought her album. “A Little Bit of Rain” is the song I put on all my high school mix CDs, but I’m still not tired of it. The perfect music for a gray day, Dalton’s voice hangs thick in the air and her lack of apology and regret is refreshing to hear.

Elvis Perkins — “While You Were Sleeping.” You could make a blanket of the description in this song, which rolls constantly off Perkins’ tongue without becoming flowery or overbearing. In this post-9/11 song, Perkins works with a melancholy sensibility without brooding or isolating himself from the audience.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy — “What’s Missing Is.” It’s hard to choose just one Will Oldham song for a fall playlist. This song, from his latest album, Lie Down in the Light, has a calm and steady rhythm with quiet harmonies that make the song perfect for keeping still. Whether you’re lying down to take a nap or taking a minute during the day to steady yourself, this song is beautiful in the autumn foliage.

Perfection for a song is, in my opinion, the capacity for endless replay. Imagine a cassette with heads as big as planets, tape unspooling endlessly into the void, notes vibrating through atmospheres, endlessly. The song shuddering off of that tape, appropriate for all times, all seasons, all strata, has got to empty space as it fills it. It’s got to be a tall drink of water that leaves you thirsty when the last drop touches your tongue. It’s got to be “Is There Any Love” by Trevor Dandy.

The song is a cut off of Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal, one of the indispensable compilations on the Numero Group label. The crate diggers at Numero have spent years unearthing forgotten funk, sometimes bringing entire labels back from the grave. Funk traveled far and wide, and Numero has followed, exhuming brilliant music from the genre in places as disparate as Cleveland and Israel. Good God!, as its title indicates, is a collection of funk songs with religious themes.

Gospel music brings to mind crimson choir robes swinging, vigorous hand claps, sweaty brows, brawny piano chords charging up to unabashed celestial refrains. It also evokes quiet, soulful pieces thick with contrition, despair, or gratitude. The genius of “Is There Any Love” is that it weds the two. It’s a song with a righteous funk motor propelling a heart so broken it can only repeat a desperate question again and again, until the absence of an answer is its own reply.

It floats gently into an album saturated with pew-quaking fervor, like a buoyant little gem. On first listen, it seems entirely unremarkable, almost unfinished, as if it were waiting for the horn players to finish their smokes and lay down a sweaty overdub. Upon the 10th spin, its flat surfaces begin to disclose hidden corridors of sound and feeling. The heartbeat of a kick drum births fluttering pulses of bongo. The flanged hand claps echo like the cracking of a prophet’s bones. And those hard-panned voices intone, over and over, “Is there any love” — a question sans question mark, a recognition of mortal entrapment, a challenge to heavens that, all too often, seem empty. The song, in its spacious self-denial, mirrors and mourns that emptiness.

Trevor Dandy sees a world devoid of love. Perhaps he would be cheered to know that, for possessing this song, the world is one resonant heartbeat closer to perfection.

The world works on the energy of opposing forces, and High Places is no different. Its two members couldn’t be further apart: Mary, 24, majored in orchestral bassoon performance and grew up in small-town Michigan, while Rob, 34, was studying visual art and engaging in the punk and hardcore music scenes. The group’s songs are just as surprising.

They manage to take elements of electronic and noise music and merge it with tropical rhythms and sweet-sounding semi-spoken vocals to make some counterintuitive — and surprisingly danceable — pop songs. When asked about his vision for the group, Rob told the music download website eMusic, “I thought it would be cool to channel something like Beat Happening and filter it through Black Dice.”

Their technique is admittedly haphazard and results in songs that are sometimes surprising, even to the duo. The songs start off without much direction in mind, but according to Rob, “Lyrically is when it starts to take hold for me as far as what the song really feels like … before that it just seems fragmented.” The real magic, it seems, comes from the collaboration: They’ve even gone so far as to describe themselves as a trio, saying, “It’s almost like a third person making the music.” Certainly, High Places is more than the sum of its parts, both members with their own diverse and differing background adding something to the entire process.

Mary and Rob met in Brooklyn in 2006 and High Places started as an experiment that was only supposed to last a summer. It soon became clear that High Places was something more and Mary abandoned her plans to continue to graduate school: “A lot of times, you learn what you don’t want to do from school…. I want to break all of these rules I just learned.” They released a number of limited-edition seven inches and compilation tracks that were compiled into an album by eMusic, then released on CD by their new label, Thrill Jockey. Their self-titled debut full-length album is out Sept. 23, and marks significant growth for the duo. Partly to account for this growth, according to Rob, is their exhaustive touring, especially with “Lucky Dragons, who construct music in a lot of similar ways, using acoustic sounds and piecing them together into a bigger picture.” Mary added, “You learn so much from seeing a band play every night that you can’t help being influenced by something.”