Twelve Songs of Christmas

Season eight ends with what I hope will be a tradition--a Christmas party, with a few guests and a lot of music.  This week's guests include comic artist Peter Bagge, singer Judy Whitmore, and indie rock artist Hibou. Bagge is coming to New Orleans in January for the Fan Expo, and I have been a fan dating back to his NYC punk days. He's best known for the comic Hate and the young-punks-in-love adventures of Buddy Bradley and his friends. Last year, he considered how they'd grow up in Hate Revisited.  While talking, we discussed his favorite Christmas music.  I also talked to vocalist Judy Whitmore, who has also been pilot Judy Whitmore, author Judy Whitmore, and ... I'll let her explain. Her album, Christmas, flies the flag for the classic aesthetics of Christmas music. I also mention in the episode an article by April Clare Welsh at ChartMetric.com that quotes me in her piece on the way Christmas music is become sadder. Is that perhaps because the world is getting sadder?  I also featured new Christmas music from É Arenas, whose 2024 interview ran in full earlier this season. This year, he recorded a new song, "Go Santa Go," and included it with all of his holiday music on the new vinyl album, Yo Soy Tu Santa. Earlier this year, I interviewed the indie pop artist Hibou for my non-Christmas website, My Spilt Milk, but while I had him on the line, I had to ask him about Christmas music as well. Finally, I mentioned this year's Christmas Underground playlist and the streaming version of my own playlist. 

This week’s episode features two interviews—one with Grammy-winning jazz saxophone player Miguel Zenón helping us appreciate the salsa Christmas classic Asalto Navideño by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe. Asalto Navideño was reissued on vinyl this holiday season by Craft Recordings.   The other is with music industry veterans Jonathan McHugh and Tamara Conniff, who worked together to produce A Life in Rhythm: The Ray Conniff Story about her father.  The episode also includes new Christmas music from Kristian Noel Pedersen, who appeared on the podcast earlier this season. You can find his new album, Bullshit & Gift Wrapping at his Bandcamp page. In the episode, we also hear music from the late Raul Malo of The Mavericks. I wrote about the Mavericks’ return in 2013, but never got a chance to interview Malo, whose Marshmallow World & Other Favorites is a wonderful introduction to his charms as a singer.  The episode also includes “Two XMAS” by New Fools from the New Orleans indie Christmas compilation, A Strange Daisy Christmas.  If you’d like this year’s Christmas mix, email me at Alex@myspiltmilk.com. If you have a cool mix yourself, send it or a link over. I’d love to hear it. 

We're in the last weeks before Christmas and I have more interviews than I can handle.  This week starts with a version of "Wonderful Christmas Time" by Twanguero before we get to my interview with Roland Gift, ex of Fine Young Cannibals. He talks about the way a new Chanel ad campaign with Dua Lipa and Blackpink's Jennie has introduced a new generation to the Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," and about FYC40, an compilation of the band's hits with a second disc of dance remixes.  Gift also mentions the video for "Everybody Knows it's Christmas." I follow that with Ketch Secor and Morgan Jahnig from Old Crow Medicine Show, who this year released OCMS Xmas, their first Christmas album. There's a lot of good stuff in that conversation, more than we have time for in this episode, so I'll revisit it in its entirety next season.  Finally, I talk to Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics about the reissue of their album, Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah, where they added music to lyrics written by Guthrie. Here too, there's more good stuff than we had time for, so I'll return to this next conversation next season as well.  One mea culpa: The most embarrassing moment of the season comes in conjunction with this interview because on Apple Music, the song I lead into the conversation with appears as "Ny Psycho Freylekhs." I pronounced it that way, then realized when I downloaded the song after the introduction had been recorded that it was "NY" as in "New York," not "Ny" as in the end is nigh. I never feel smart staggering through other languages, but I haven't felt as dumb as I did when I saw the proper spelling. The episode ends with music by Haunted House Party from A Strange Daisy Christmas.   

We're in December now, and this week we have three conversations. William Shatner's face is on the pop culture Mt. Rushmore, and when I had a chance to interview him for The New Orleans Advocate in advance at his appearance at Pop Expo in town, I couldn't pass up the chance to ask him about 2018's Shatner Claus. It's a short interview, but I have it so you get to hear it.  The interview begins with us talking about You Can Call Me Bill, a documentary from 2023 about his life and career. The story I wrote for the Advocate deals with the way that his career has opened up opportunities for him late in life. The episode also features a new song, "I am Falling Snow," from Sara Noelle. In 2023, Sara was a guest on 12 Songs to talk about her body of Christmas music.  Jazz vocalist Jane Monheit has become well known for Christmas music with two Christmas albums and a yearly holiday season tour that will bring her to New Orleans on Sunday night.  This conversation is an edited version of a longer conversation that we'll run in its entirety next season  Finally, singer Kelly Finnigan has a new Christmas single. Earlier this season, I talked to Shawn Lee about recording "Say It Again" with soul singer Kelly Finnigan.  I first talked to Finnigan in 2020 when he released A Joyful Sound, which I consider to be a modern Christmas music classic. It sounds like a lost R&B record from the late 1960s or early 1970s with psychedelic and moody touches. We talk more about that album five years later and his new Christmas single, "I Can't Wait (for Christmas Time)."   Finally, we revisit the new A Strange Daisy Christmas, a collection of Christmas songs by members of the New Orleans indie rock community. A week or so ago I featured Loucey's "Christmas (bAbYpLeAze CoMeHoMe), and this week's show ends with The Self-Help Tapes' version of Christmas Treat." The song started as a late-in-the-show Saturday Night Live sketch that The Strokes' Julian Casablancas remade as a rock 'n' roll Christmas standard. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) made itself part of this year's music story with AI acts The Velvet Sundown, TaTa Taktumi and Breaking Rust making news one way or another.  This week, Ken Kessler of the podcast The Sounds of Christmas and Gerry D from the Totally Rad Christmas podcast join me to talk about the way AI Christmas music foreshadowed some of this. We talk about an early effort created by University of Toronto researchers, "Rudolph the All-Gracious King" and it's companion how-it's-done video), and the heavy metal "Christmas Overdrive." We also talked about faux-vintage Christmas songs posted at the RAI Music page.  

Multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory remembers playing and recording with Brian Wilson from 1999 until he retired from live performances in 2022. We talk about the recently reissued Brian Wilson: Live at the Roxy, Brian Wilson presents SMiLE, and his 2005 solo Christmas album, What I Really Want for Christmas.  In the process, Gregory provides insight into the later stages of Brian's life and musical career, including perhaps why What I Really Want for Christmas received a lukewarm response (other than following the completed SMiLE, of course). Last week started this look back at Brian's Christmas music with his biographer David Leaf on The Beach Boys' Christmas Album.  In the episode, I mentioned my 2005 interview with Brian and story on the remaking of SMiLE, and my review of Brian's 2017 show in New Orleans. I also mentioned Amazon Music's “Amazon Music Originals- Holiday” playlist.  

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. 

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.     

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. 

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 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.