Twelve Songs of Christmas

I started thinking about how to address Brian Wilson’s death on the podcast since we learned of his passing. “Little Saint Nick” and The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album are Christmas classics that needed to be addressed, but how or with who? The answer came when Oglio Records announced that it planned to reissue a 25th anniversary edition of Brian Wilson: Live at the Roxy. The promotional efforts behind that release put a number of possible interviews at my disposal. 

This week, writer David Leaf talks about Brian in 2000 and 1963’s The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album. Leaf has written liner notes for numerous Beach Boys and Brian Wilson releases, and wrote The Beach Boys and the California Myth (1978) and SMiLE: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of Brian Wilson, which was released earlier this year. 

In the episode, I mentioned the new Beach Boys’ holiday EP A Little Saint Nick Christmas with The Beach Boys. It’s all previously released songs and mixes, but it’s on sale now. 

I also mentioned the upcoming Strange Daisy Christmas, a compilation of Christmas songs by the New Orleans indie community on Strange Daisy Records. You can order it now online from Bandcamp.

I featured Loucey’s version of Darlene Love’s “Christmas (bAbYpLeAze CoMeHoMe)” in the episode, and earlier in the year I interviewed Cherie McCabe of Loucey after the release of their debut album, Participation Trophy Wife.

Next week, I’ll be back with more on Brian Wilson when I talk to musician Probyn Gregory about playing in Brian’s band in concert and in the studio when he recorded his 2005 solo Christmas album, What I Really Want for Christmas. 

Producer and multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee has a history of making recordings that hover uncertainly in time. Sounds from different eras and genres come together in his music to sound like lost, regional 45s. 

We talk about his influences--library music and hip-hop--as well as his two Christmas albums: A Very Ping Pong Christmas from Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra (2007) and Kung Fu Christmas by Shawn Lee (2021).

Toronto's Kristian Noel Pedersen has released 27 EPs or albums of Christmas music, 26 of which are on his Bandcamp page. What started as a goof became a project that stretched him as an artist. We hear music from all phases of his Christmas career including (in order):

1. "Home Alone Pt. 1"

2. "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis"

3. "All I Want for Christmas is You"

4. "A Step-Mother's First (and Worst) Christmas Ever"

5. "Merry Christmas Baby"

6. "Christmas Without You"

7. "Hard Candy Christmas"

8. "Silver, Never Gold"

9. "What Are You Doing (on Christmas Eve)?"

10. "Pack Your Bags!"

We also hear a new song, "A Very Gen X Christmas" from The Static Dive.  

In my conversation with Kristian, I mention the episode on Hanson with Isaac Hanson, and the one that traces the musical life of "Hard Candy Christmas." 

I've been out of town this week, and when I thought of an episode from the archives to revisit, this one from 2021 with guitar hero Steve Lukather came immediately to mind. It's useful to remember that this was the second year of COVID--not full lockdown, but a lot of precautions and a lot of staying home. I gather Lukather is or has been a social animal, and in a time when it was hard to be social, I was the fortunate beneficiary of his willingness to talk and share.

Since we talked, Lukather has released another album, 2023's Bridges with Toto singer Joseph Williams. 

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.

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.

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. 

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 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. 

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.