Guest: Anna Pickard

This week we're joined by Anna Pickard, and playing music of the season to wrap up No Magic for 2019. Where did the year go? Anna finds deep meaning between music that makes this time of year for her, and our shared sense of place as ex-pats, surrounding by the seasonal norms of another country and different people. There's so much about Christmas that's intense, emotionally elevated, and the music on tonights show that reflects that, subverts it, viserally captures it, or sometimes just shares in its sentiments. For me, that combination resonates the sense of space that I like to find at this time of year — the duopoly of being close to my family who I love, with moments alone to decompress from each year. Anna finds threads of the experiences she wants to make out of Christmas, the founding of new traditions.

Accompanying all this is our record of the week, Slow Club's Christmas Thanks for Nothing EP, which is beautiful as it is somewhat subversive, and provides some excuse to talk about one of my all time favourite bands.

And as a bonus, we discussed this cursed version of Slade's Merry Christmas Everyone, but didn't actually play it as promised. So here you go:

Merry Christmas Everybody by Slade but all the lyrics are 'are you hanging up your stocking on your wall' pic.twitter.com/dzljqugQDu

— Michael M