Twelve Songs of Christmas

Doing All-Christmas Radio Right with Kevin Robinson

Since streamed playlists and all-Christmas radio are the way most people hear Christmas music, they're fascinations of mine. This week I'm back on the radio beat with long-time radio guy Kevin Robinson. 

I wanted to talk to Kevin when I saw a post he wrote for the industry site Barrett Media on best practices for the all-Christmas format shift.  Since we talked, he interviewed me along with station programmers about programming Christmas stations and playlists. 

In the episode, we hear music from The Glad Singers' awesome Christmas with a Beat.

We also hear "(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays" by The Carpenters, "Frosty the Snowman" by Esquivel, "O Tannenbaum" by Vince Guaraldi Trio, and "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande. 

The episode finishes with the audio from a performance of a Christmas version of PSY's "Gangnam Style" performed at a benefit fundraiser in Washington, DC with an audience that included President Barack Obama and his family. The video is worth seeing to fully appreciate the moment. 

Photo by selim buka on Unsplash.

Sloan

Chris Murphy of the Canadian indie rock band Sloan describes them as "a cult band," but they're a cult band with legs. They started in 1991 and recently released their 14th album, Based on the Best Seller.

This week Murphy talks about how a band with kids and members in their 50s works, and what democracy looks like in a band. Murphy talks about the fake B-movie trailers the band shot to draw attention to songs from the new album, and they're well worth seeing.

We also hear part of three songs from Based on the Best Seller:

1. "Live Forever"

2. "Dream Destroyer"

3. "Capitol Cooler"

Of course, we also talked about their Christmas recordings and a possible Christmas album.

In the episode, I mentioned a story that quotes me on programming all-Christmas radio and Christmas playlists.  

Finally, the episode ends with Los Del Rio's "Christmas Macarena," which has an entertaining video on YouTube.

Christmas at K-Mart with Mark Davis

Mark Davis has turned the in-store music cassettes he pocketed while working at a K-Mart in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s into “Attention K-Mart Shoppers,” a digitized collection of that background music at the Internet Archive (archive.org, not archive.com as I announced on the show). 

Others have since contributed parts of the K-Mart and Kresge’s lore, augmenting his collection with tapes and vinyl records distributed 10 to 15 years earlier than Davis’ time with the one-time retail giant. Oddly, where Christmas music is concerned, it changed very little from decade to decade, and while Christmas 1990 has nods to modernity, there were still easy listening favorites including The Living Strings and Perry Como. 

The episode deals with the enduring legacy of a formal, lightly orchestral musical ideal and the way certain musical values were assumed to be immutable. That’s a subject for future conversations, but we start it here.

In this episode, I played a number of songs without identifying them. Frequently, the artist or song is obvious, but that’s not the case this week. You hear in order:

1. “Let It Snow” - Ferrante & Teicher 

2. “Winter Wonderland” - Frank DeVol and the Rainbow Strings

3. “The Christmas Song” - Al Hirt (from an amazing Christmas album, The Sound of Christmas)

4. “This Christmas” - The Jets

5. “Christmas Tree” - The Glad Singers

This episode also has information on JD McPherson’s Christmas tour this year. McPherson’s Socks is one of my favorite modern Christmas albums, and we had a good conversation about it on the podcast in 2019.

Finally, we ended with The Weather Girls’ “Dear Santa (Bring Me a Man This Christmas).” The song benefits from the video treatment. 

Solo Piano for Christmas with Nick Bhalla

Last year, Minneapolis-based jazz pianist Nick Bhalla released Saint Nick, a lovely album of solo jazz piano treatments of Christmas classics. His approach is interest in his laser-like focus on harmony, at the expense of the improvisation that dominates much of his musical practice. Rather than explore the melodic possibilities the best loved Christmas songs offer, he hones in on harmony, creating a tight, lovely half-hour of beautiful Christmas music. 

You can find Bhalla's music at his Bandcamp page, and in the episode I mentioned the "Festive Foreign Film Fans" podcast, and you can find it on Spotify. 

The "All I Want for Christmas is You" Lawsuit

The headlines tell a version of the story:

 

“MARIAH CAREY SUED AGAIN OVER ‘ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU’ — BY THE SAME GUY,” according to Billboard.

 

“Mariah Carey is SUED AGAIN over All I Want For Christmas Is You... as two writers claim her 1994 classic is a ripoff of their song of the same name” according to The Daily Mail.

 

“Mariah Carey Sued By Random Man For Allegedly Stealing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ From Him,” according to Pedestrian.tv.

 

The story of Andy Stone from New Orleans’ Vince Vance and the Valiants’ copyright infringement lawsuit over “All I Want for Christmas is You” was never taken seriously, as if the idea of suing Mariah Carey was absurd on its face. Withdrawing the suit once and re-filing it probably didn’t help, but Valiant/Stone got to market first with a song titled “All I Want for Christmas is You” in 1989, five years before Carey’s. It charted in the 30s on country radio and showed some durability including covers by LeAnn Rimes and Kelly Clarkson among others. 

 

Carey’s song will never be mistaken for the Vince Vance and the Valiants’ song, but the specifics of copyright law dictate that there are other tests of copyright infringement, so the suit wasn’t obviously as frivolous as some headline writers implied. 

 

This week’s episode tells the story as we know it so far based on media coverage. Along the way, we hear Vince Vance’s version, along with Kelly Clarkson and LeAnn Rimes’ versions. We also hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” along with the version from Love Actually and covers by She & Him and PJ Morton. 

Dub Reggae for Holidays with Black Market Dub

This week's guests are Black Market and Wise Owl (or Nate Bridges and Brandon Niznik) of the Los Angeles-based duo Black Market Dub. On their Bandcamp page, they introduce themselves with a series of questions: "What would happen if The Beach Boys had The Wailers as their backing band instead of The Wrecking Crew? What if David Bowie spent the summer of 1975 in Kingston, Jamaica with King Tubby instead of Philidelphia? Michael Jackson meets Scratch Perry?"

Many of their releases give us the answers to those question by wiping the backing tracks to some of the most famous songs from the '60s, '70s and '80s and remaking the songs with dub-wise reggae instead. Their tracks with The Clash caught the ear of music critic Tim "Napalm" Stegall, who wrote about them on his Substack, and that's where I found out about them. 

Those tracks are fun but a little too respectful of the source material for my tastes. I prefer their true dub projects including their Christmas album, A Black Market Christmas, from 2022. It honors dub's naturally psychedelic nature without selling out the Christmas classics. 

We talk about their journey into dub, through a music teacher who introduced Brandon to the Trojan Box Set (we hear "The Death of Mr. Spock" by the Roots Radics Band) and Grand Theft Auto III, which introduced Nate and Brandon to Scientist and his 1981 classic, Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (we hear "The Voodoo Curse)."

Nate and Brandon have also started a podcast, Playback, that features the two of them discussing albums and artists who are important to them. This summer they interviewed Scientist, and we talk about their debut episode from December 2024, which focused on Bob Dylan's 2009 Christmas album Christmas in the Heart.

The vinyl Black Market Dub releases are available on Escape Hatch Records. Nate says there aren't many copies of A Black Market Christmas left, so if you want one, get one. 

The Birth of All-Christmas Radio with Jerry Ryan

These days, we take the all-Christmas radio format for granted. Every year, countless adult contemporary--AC--stations temporarily change their format and go wall to wall with Christmas music somewhere between Halloween and Black Friday. Jerry Ryan gets the credit for pioneering the switch when he was vice president and general manager of KESZ-FM in Phoenix in 1990. Once he did it in a market the size of Phoenix, others followed in his footsteps. 

This week, Jerry Ryan tells radio stories, remembering his journey to the holiday season in 1990 and the thought process that led him to all-Christmas radio. 

If you'd like more on all-Christmas radio, you can check out a piece I wrote for New Orleans' Times-Picayune in 2016, and my Twelve Songs episode with Steve Suter, program director for New Orleans' Magic 101.9. Suter's Christmas programming runs counter to some of Ryan's thoughts on the subject, but in other ways his ideas about radio line up nicely.

The episode ends with one of my favorite categories of Christmas song--the holiday adaptation of a seasonal hit. One year, I couldn't get enough of "Macarena Christmas (Joy Mix)," and this week we're going back to 1993 when the vocal group H-Town turned the sexy slow jam "Knockin' da Boots" into "Knockin' Boots for Christmas" for the holiday season. 

 

 

Blind Boys of Alabama on Christmas Music (Remixed)

I think of this episode of Twelve Songs as a remix, a second pass at the same material with very different results. 

In 2003, The Blind Boys of Alabama recorded Go Tell it on the Mountain, an album of gospel and gospel-inflected Christmas music that Omnivore Recordings reissued in 2016. Last season, I talked to the Blind Boys' guitarist and musical director Joey Williams about the project and how the gospel legends interacted with the musical guests brought in for the album, including Mavis Staples, Tom Waits, and Solomon Burke. He could answer some of those questions, but since some recorded their parts separately including Waits and Chrissie Hynde, there were parts of the story that he couldn't tell. 

That episode is online now, but during the year I found an interview that I had forgotten about with the album's producer, John Chelew, when the album was released. Since he was a part of those sessions, he could tell stories about Waits, Chrissie Hynde, and George Clinton and the curveballs they threw the group. 

With that in mind, I reconstructed this episode. I let the Chelew tape present a new side to the story of Go Tell it on the Mountain, and I went back to Williams to talk about a second Christmas album that the Blind Boys did, Talkin' Christmas from 2014 in collaboration with Taj Mahal. 

The audio of the Chelew recording is not up to my usual standards for the show, but when we talked I didn't have a podcast or audio use for the interview in mind. It's the quality I could get from a phone, and I wish I could have talked to Chelew again to get better audio but he died in 2016. I got used to it very quickly and didn't find it off-putting, and I hope that will be your experience as well. 

"Cumbia Navideñas" with É Arenas

Eduardo Arenas surprised me in the first moments of this week's interview when he revealed that Chicano Batman had played its last gig for now and might be done. He played bass in the band since its start in 2008, and he reflects not on his band specifically but how musicians grow apart.

As É Arenas, he has recorded at least one Christmas song a year since 2017, and what started as a challenge turned into a tradition. We talk about traditions and he helps me get a better handle on Mexican Christmas music while we talk about his own "Cumbia Navideñas"--a sound that is his own, half-joking invention following in the footsteps of Salsa Navideñas.

Along the way, we visit Christmas music from Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe, Rigo Tovar, and the inescapable "Mi Burrito Sabañero." 

Donna Summer for Disco and Christmas

Donna Summer has been a fascination of mine because she was on the cutting edge of electronic dance music, but since "I Feel Love" and other forays into early electronic music were produced by the legendary Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, it isn't clear what role she played in her sound. 

Last season I talked to songwriter Bruce Sudano about that among other things. Sudano also wrote songs for Summer and became her husband and manager. This week, I'm running that conversation in its entirety, including material I didn't use then on Sudano's entrance into show business as a member of the one-hit wonder Alive N Kickin', who made their mark in 1970 with "Tighter, Tighter."

He talks about learning songwriting from Tommy James, his early days with Summer, and the story behind her 1994 Christmas album, Christmas Spirit. We talked about her career path between her heyday in the late '70s to her faith-based Christmas album.