Yes, I know: there are like 6 people on the planet who are gonna “get” the title of this year’s seasonal music mix o’ joy and festivityness. And that’s OK. It amused me a lot, and that’s all that matters. This is a little bit late this year — sorry, blame my poor planning, and also the fact that, like most years, I had a version of this that I ended up just stripping out and almost starting over again to get something I was happy with.

One of my completely Christmas agnostic friends (so, yeah, basically “agnostic”) gave this a spin for me over the weekend and the main comment was “That first song might have people calling your mix ‘woke’.” And I’m thinking, first, that that’s fine by me. But also, that whole Christmas origin story what with the maternal empowerment and the refugees and such…it’s pretty much as woke as it gets. So yeah, we’re on theme.

For more than a decade, I’ve wanted to use that early Wailers song in a holiday mix, too. But I have never, not ever, been able to sort out how to segue in and out of reggae or ska without using the Clash, and as far as I know, there’s no Christmas hits by them floating around out there. I think I maybe cracked it this time, by finding that vintage track by The Ethiopians and also that excellent new Lou Rawls cover from the Black Pumas. (Who are great, btw.)

I also had no idea that The High Strung did a Christmas album back in 2000…and that said holiday album is so good, to boot. I’m a sucker for a rollicking holiday track that sounds like everyone recording it has been hitting the spiked eggnog first.

One of the biggest issues with my first run at this mix for 2023 is how many downer, cryin’ in my beer, I’m so miserable holiday tunes are out there currently. If you know me, you know I have zero time for doomerism, so I had to do some scrubbing. That being said, one bit of blue Christmas that survived that purge was a killer track from Aimee Mann and Ted Leo. The bridge on that song gives me goosebumps every time.

And so here’s a wild thing: one of the first holiday mixes I ever made — on a cassette tape — back in the 1990s, I put “Christmas Wrapping” on it. And over the years, I heard horror stories from friends who worked in malls and retail about hearing that song approximately 10 million times in any given December, so I’ve never used it since. (One friend of mine swears that the song played every 45 minutes at Urban Outfitters in the early Aughts.) But…it’s a cool tune. And Waitresses saxophone genius Mars Williams passed away this past year. So yeah, let’s bring that one back.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least make mention of the passing of Shane MacGowan earlier this month. “Fairytale of New York” has been part of my holiday mood-setting for more than 30 years now, and if you believe in such things, it’s nice to think that maybe in the great beyond, he and Kirsty can get together and have a pint and belt that one out again.

Anyway, I hope this li’l missive finds you all well, or with prospects to be doing well, and that however you celebrate this season that it’s a good one with new, happy memories to make. Y’all know the drill here by now: everything’s mixed to equalize the volume, and everything’s sequenced just so and held together as one MP3. Right-click and save the title, or just be a rebel and click and play if that’s your thing. Have a happy and safe holiday everyone!

Sleigh Tracks 2023 (Holiday Music Mix, 2023)

Track List:

It’s a sun-splashed Saturday where I live today. The kind of Saturday morning that stands out in childhood nostalgia where it’s warm but not too hot, where there’s a vague whiff in the air of freshly mowed lawns, and where the days feel bulging with the possibility of doing utterly fun things that even a kind observer would describe as doing not much at all.

It’s a Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci sort of a Saturday.

What does that entail, you might ask? Well, GZM were a Welsh band that made a good go of it during the 1990s and early Aughts before calling it quits. Stylistically, they just followed their particular muse wherever it may have led them, and it took them all over the map, from stomping 90s indie rock to early stirrings of what the kids today call freak folk to old school prog rock to experimental weirdness. Oh, and a fair amount of their songs were sung in their native Welsh, so yeah. Probably a long shot to find a huge audience, I suppose.

But what connects them to this particular Saturday for me is how many Gorky’s songs feel connected to the earth and nature around all of us, and especially the Summer. An awful lot of GZM songs are about the summer, and sound like the kind of musical soundtrack you’d be listening to lying on your back on the top of a small hill on a meadow, leaning against a shade tree reading a book.

And so, I thought, I’ll make myself a Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci playlist on Spotify. Except no, I can’t. GZM’s recording career was split across five different record labels, only one of which (Beggar’s Group/Mantra) felt like putting their music up on streaming services. (Terrible label support dogged the band throughout their career — Mercury/Polygram even declined to issue one of their best records in North America back in the day, and it’s never gotten a proper stateside release to this day.)

Thus, as you’ve guessed no doubt, I made myself my own Gorky’s playlist from my own record collection. And I put every song in this hour-long playlist into a specific order for summer afternoon listening as a single stitched-together file, with the volume normalized across everything, as usual. And because more people should listen to one of the best, loveliest bands to ever exist, I’m sharing it here.

(If you’re interested in more info on Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, here’s the quick rundown: they formed while the band members were all in the Welsh equivalent of American high school. The band’s singer and principle songwriter, Euros Childs — and his sister Megan, who plays fiddle and sings in the band — were raised in a home where their parents taught them to speak Welsh first. The band’s name is terrible, and apparently deliberately so. As Childs once told an interviewer, “Gorky’s” was just their teenaged slang for gawky, “Mynci” is a creative misspelling of the Welsh word mwnci for monkey, and Zygotic came from a biology class, with the group name meant to be the worst name they could come up with as a lark. Everyone in the band could sing and play beautifully, lending especially to complex arrangements and harmonies to prop up Childs’ whimsical, occasionally deliberately wobbly voice. Oh, and they wrote some of the most insanely catchy and lovely songs I’ve ever heard, so forewarned on the earworms coming your way here. There’s a person who’ll hear a line like “You used to be the sunshine girl but now you’re crying all the time for some past-gone time…” and be indifferent to it…this mix is definitely not for that soul.)

Anyway: music. Click to stream, right-click to download to add to your favorite music playback thingy.

Can’t Wait ‘Til Summer

(Track list)

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Blessed Kwanzaa! Or just best wishes on the end of the year, happy solstice, etc. etc. Regardless of how or why you celebrate, it’s that time of year when a young man’s attentions turn to cheer, joy, friends and family nearby and far away.

I really planned to have this done last week. Two weeks ago, even. But every time I’d listen to the mix of songs I thought I’d use, I’d realize that the mix was either really slow and sad-feeling (which, yeah, I’m not here to be the Feelings Police by any means, but I’m also not making music mixes for Christmas to have everyone crying in their seasonal Christmas ales either.) I tried moving songs around. Nope. So I started subbing stuff in, and tearing stuff out.

Thus and so, suddenly it’s Sunday and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll even have a holiday music fiesta to share this year. After having a lovely dinner out with a couple of friends, I got home that evening and decided to do a little bit of prep for work on Monday — meaning fiddling with some spreadsheets. Excitement. I also figured I’d take another stab at things with the holiday music mix, and rearranged a few more songs, added two, took out three. Started playing it while I worked, not really paying attention to the tunes.

And so that’s when it happened. Somewhere around minute six or seven or eight into the mix, I realized that I’ve had kind of been bopping and bouncing in my desk chair to the music, absently playing drums on my desk with a pen. And all that warm and fuzzy George Baileyish, Bob Cratchity holiday spirit is roaring in my veins.

Which is to say, we have a mix of holiday tunes for 2022! What do we have this year?

The whole thing kicks off with the inimitable JD McPherson. JD’s Christmas album, Socks, is a must-have. And wahey, a new Chris Isaak holiday music album? Yeah, sign me up. And though I’m no fan of certain singers trying to proclaim themselves the Queen of Christmas or whatever, I am a huge fan of Charly Bliss taking that singer’s song and absolutely rocking it; I’ll take helium-voiced Charly Bliss lead vocalist Eva Hendricks over the original any day.

There’s lots of fun stuff packed in here. Irish band Pugwash do a ripping good job with XTC’s “Thanks for Christmas”, and God bless Pugwash frontman Thomas Walsh for singing it in his own Dublin accent (essentially making this song “T’anks for Christmas”). I love Remi Wolf’s soulful take on “Winter Wonderland”. I’d also been thinking about using Sparks’s amazing “Thank God it’s Not Christmas” in a mix for more than a decade, but always wondered, “Are people ready for Sparks?” It’s 2022. Any of y’all who are still uninitiated and unaware of their enduring brilliance are finally ready for Sparks.

One of the few repeat tracks on this year’s mix is “Just Like Christmas” by Low. Sadly, Low singer and drummer Mimi Parker passed away a few weeks ago, and I’ve had that track going through my mind ever since…so it’s here again. I love the Swansea Sound song here as well; that’s the collaboration of Hue Williams and Amelia Fletcher (Heavenly, Marine Girls, etc) and company. (Should any young’uns out there ever be told that playing rock and roll is the way to a dissolute future, steer them to Ms. Fletcher’s hilariously unique wikipedia page which begins by identifying her as a singer, songwriter, guitarist and economist before noting that she’s a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.) And finally, if “Groovy Xmas” by the Linda Lindas doesn’t get your blood pumping, you may not be ready for the oncoming holiday.

As is tradition, this is one long MP3 — everything’s sequenced the way I’d like, with the volume across the tracks normalized so you won’t get too blasted out by the rockers here. You should be able to right-click and download, or just click to stream.

And as always, I hope this music finds you in fine fettle. Have a happy and joyous and safe holiday season!

Oh, and howzabout a track list:

In the first week of March of 2020 like lots of us, the oncoming pandemic got the better of Daniel Romano and his band The Outfit. The group’s seemingly endless tour was on the east coast of the US when I’m assuming a combination of Covid-cancelled gigs and worries over getting back across the border into their native Canada had them pull up stakes and head back home to Welland, Ontario.

During a mandatory self-quarantine on return, Romano — who apparently needs to be making music the way sharks need to swim — plotted out what an extended time being unable to play live shows might mean for him. And I guess he decided to return to some album demos he’d come up with over previous years. (Note, not song demos — full albums he’d written out and maybe recorded quick demos for.)

And so by mid-March, Visions Of The Higher Dream, an album credited to Romano solo — with some assistance from friends — landed. As the pandemic wore on through the year, from March through November Romano released an absurd 10 albums (I think that’s the number we’ve all settled on now for that). Those include three records with (or as) the Outfit. (Of which, it should be said, is about the tightest, sharpest rock and roll band on the planet right now, and if you get a chance to see them on their current endless tour you should. Thank me later.)

He also put out a couple of collaborations: a 22-minute prog rock song with Danny Carey of Tool, and a sort of post-hardcore power-pop ep called Super Pollen. Interspersed through all of that were four records — all solo, with Romano playing most of the instruments in his home studio — that seem sort of thematically linked to one another. In addition to Vision Of The Higher Dream, there’s Dandelion, White Flag, and in March of 2021, Kissing The Foe. That’s four solo albums in about a calendar year.

And when I first realized how many of these solo records Romano dropped in a year, without having sat to listen to them I figured “Oh, he just put out his demos.” Which…no. Imagine my surprise when these turned out to be fully-realized, fully-arranged tracks, none of which sound incomplete. Quite the opposite, in fact; these are songs that sound complete and lush and meticulously crafted.

But what links them together in my mind at least is the kind of music on them. Those four records seem to be tapping into this circa 1970-1973 era of Neil Young, early McCartney solo, Danny Kirwan era Fleetwood Mac and absolutely Badfinger. With horns. And string sections.

And for whatever reason, only a small number of the records released by Romano and the Outfit and other friends during this absurdly productive lockdown period are available through your traditional streamers. And NONE of these four thematically linked solo albums are. They’re only available from You’ve Changed Records (the label that Romano and Constantines singer/guitarist Steven Lambke founded) on Bandcamp. And the next time we get to a Bandcamp Friday you should definitely grab as many Daniel Romano albums as you can from them: https://danielromano.bandcamp.com/music

In the meantime, it was feeling to me like in these four solo albums I’d discovered some sort of hidden goldmine. I don’t think these records are meant to be secret. I don’t think they’re meant to be tough to track down. But damn. It feels like a whole lot of folks that listen to the a lot of the same music I listen to should be listening to these albums. On repeat. Constantly.

So I created a 1-hour sampler platter from those records. 16 tracks. It honestly feels like you could make three similar playlists from just these albums and they’d all be good, because as individual albums they’re all so great. And if you expand things to include The Outfit records, and other stuff Romano and the band recorded together you could put together more than a half-dozen playlists of similar quality music without having to try too hard.

And so without further ado, here’s my little Daniel Romano One Year solo playlist/mix. As I do with these things, it’s one extended MP3, with the sound volume normalized, tracks in a specific running order, and everything crossfaded with purpose to make for a fire-and-forget 57 minutes covering 16 songs. Since (I’m hoping) you’re going to hear songs here and immediately need to know what they’re called, here’s the track list:

1. “Where May I Take My Rest”
2. “I Cannot Be More Lonely”
3. “maybe today will be curious”
4. “if you don’t or if you do”
5. “I’m Only Love”
6. “Singers In Season”
7. “Into A Rainbow”
8. “Mysterious Storm”
9. “Don’t Turn Around Janet”
10. “Appaipoure”
11. “Nobody Sees A Lowered Face”
12. “New Milk”
13. “Blue Heron”
14. “Walking Around Holding Hands”
15. “Hot Change”
16. “Lilac About Thy Crown”
    

Click this to stream/download/listen:
Daniel Romano’s Solo Pandemic Year

(Recommended very strongly for aficionados of circa-1971 post Beatle solo work by Sir Paul and George Harrison, as well as fans of Neil Young of that era, Ian Matthews, Danny Kirwan, Badfinger, The Rolling Stones, Flying Burrito Brothers, etc.)

Well Merry Christmas, or happy whatever-holiday-you-like for 2021! It’s been a long year, but we sure have come through quite a journey, right? Sure, we’re dealing with worries about the future, and especially Covid, and….wait.

Is this Christmas or Groundhog Day?

Yeah, yeah. I know it sucks to still be dealing with the same ol’ crap in a brand new year and whatnot. Welcome to living in interesting times, I guess. And I sense that among many households, Christmas is going to once again be a very low-key affair yet again, which stinks.

But it is the holidays. There’s a chill in the air. It’s snowing in places that desperately need snow. Everyone in our neighborhood has lights up outside. While standing in line at the bank last week, people were actually…friendly? December always has worked some wonders on the psyche.

And so that brings me to this year’s holiday music mix. I nearly went for something more somber downcast, given all the pain and sadness in the world right now. But then I realized that there’s always pain and sadness in the world, every December. And every other month in every other year, too. That’s what the world is, I’m afraid.

But if you’re willing to see it, there’s also so many reasons to be happy, thankful, and yeah, even a little joyful this December as well. And so given the choice of going for Sad Christmas songs or Happy, I decided to do a little bit of dancing in the snow, so to speak. Thus, this year’s mix is teeming with happy songs, both new and a few favorites from years gone by — including the return of the capper for Christmas mixes past, because why not.

And so here you’re gonna find David Newton and his newish band kicking things off. If you’re a Britpop fan, you may recognize his voice from The Mighty Lemon Drops, back in the day. Don’t trust the title of that Candypants song about Happiest Time and whatnot…but don’t worry, because the amazing voice of Grant Lee Phillips is there to bring the mood back pretty quickly.

And you all were supposed to make “Christmas With the Snow” a perennial holiday favorite when last I used it on a mix about 10 years ago. Yet somehow it languishes with fewer than 10,000 plays on Spotify. I know that song is A LOT to take the first time you hear it. But it’s never leaving your brain after that, and you’re gonna come back to it, and in no time it’s going to make you feel like Snoopy dancing.

We back it off a little after Lou Rawls’s joyous holiday track (note to self, I need to listen to more Lou Rawls in the new year). I mean, you can’t follow that exuberance, really. But we build it back up later (Otis is back!), continue the mood with that EXCEPTIONAL song by Blackbird, and finally take it home to a familiar finish.

I hope this season finds you well in spirit and mind. As usual, it’s one long connected MP3, sequenced and mixed for normalized volume. Be safe and mindful this winter! Get vaccinated, get boosted when you’re eligible, and be smart out there so we can all come back next December again!

What’s that? A track list? Coming up:

1. Vale, Norm
2. “Winter Tragedy” David Newton & Thee Mighty Angels
3. “All The Gifts I Need” JD McPherson
4. “The Happiest Time of the Year” Candypants
5. “Winterglow” Grant Lee Phillips
6. “Christmas With The Snow” Marah, feat. Felicia Navidad
7. “Dancing in the Snow” The Leopards
8. “Good Time Christmas” Lou Rawls
9. “Yule Tide Me Over” The Minus 5 feat. Kelly Hogan
10. “Hear the Bells” Calexico
11. “Greensleeves” Vince Guaraldi Trio
12. “Winter Goes Away” I Was A King
13. “Lady December” The Concretes
14. “Christmas Party” Dr. Dog
15. “Merry Christmas, Baby” Otis Redding
16. “Christmas Getaway” Blackbird
17. “All I Want For Christmas” Pip Blom
18. “She Whispers The Winter Snow” The Autumns
19. “Cocktail for Christmas” India Ramey
20. “Quartermaster’s Wintertime” Bill Fox
21. The Boys of the NYPD Choir singin’ Galway Bay…

On the Sunday evening before Thanksgiving this year, I was out taking a long walk through the neighborhood, enjoying the unseasonably warm 60-degree temperatures (and trying not to think too much about the implications of that happening more and more in Novembers of late.) A couple of houses in my neighborhood already had full Christmas lights and yard displays up and running. While most houses on our street will have some sort of decorations up at some point, this was notable for the way it sort of stuck out. Really? Christmas lights? This early?

And the more I thought about it, the more I thought “Yeah. Hell yeah. This early. I’m all in.”

2020 has been one hell of a year, kind of literally. By the time this post goes live, it’s likely 300,000 Americans will have died from the pandemic. 300,000 people many of whom maybe celebrated Christmas a year ago and thought in terms of “Next Christmas” who never got here because of a brutal disease. And that doesn’t count the millions hospitalized, the families affected, or the trauma of healthcare workers who’ve been had to work through exhaustion for months. It also doesn’t include folks who saw their businesses or careers collapse due to the knock on effects of Covid. And then you add to that the current political climate in this country, and there’s an almost palpable sense of fear, anger, grief, and just general anxiety floating in the air.

So yeah. It’s been a brutal year. And yet, there are folks putting up Christmas lights all over. And making music. And figuring out ways to celebrate even so. You could forgive folks for reining it in this year, and I know that many are. We’re going to celebrate the holidays differently in 2020, through Zoom calls and virtual hugs and with facemasks making up the a big part of the gay apparel we don, and a vague antiseptic whiff of hand sanitizer hanging in the air instead of mistletoe.

But lots of us are going to figure out a way to celebrate the season regardless, whether it’s Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa or just the solstice and the winter. And coming in at the tail end of this awful year, any celebration of the holidays almost feels like an act of defiance. Putting up lights, decorating the house, heck, just listening to some Christmas tunes or maybe watching Charlie Brown for the gajillionth time…we’re celebrating, dang it. And if that means putting up the lights too early, and maybe going a little too exuberant on the Christmas tunes in this holiday music mix to extend a big middle finger to the awfulness of the year past…then so be it. Headfirst into Christmas in 2020!

As always, this is a single long MP3 of about 20 or so holiday-themed tunes. You can right-click and “save as”, or it should just stream from here if that’s your thing.

Track list:
1. Oh…that girl.
2. “Every Single Christmas” Nicole Atkins
3. “Go Power at Christmas Time” James Brown
4. “It Doesn’t Feel Like Christmas” Sam Phillips
5. “Winter Blows” The Waterboys
6. “Headfirst Into Christmas” The Hannah Barberas
7. “Mission Bells” Glossary
8. “Claus vs Claus” JD McPherson
9. “The Blizzard” Camera Obscura
10.”Winter is Blue” Vashti Bunyan
11.”Ringing Bells on Christmas Day” Lisa Mychols
12.”Everyday is Christmas (When I’m Lovin’ You) Charles Bradley
13.”Valley Winter Song” Fountains of Wayne
14.”Merry Merry” The Bird and the Bee
15.”Hark the Herald” The Fall (this is not a typo, btw.)
16.”All I Want for Christmas is You” The Dollyrots
17.”Christmastime Heist” Mikal Cronin
18.”Christmas Love” The Rotary Connection
19.”Shouldn’t Be Alone For Christmas” The School
20.”Winter” The Rolling Stones
21.”The Light Before We Land” The Delgados

Although this Christmas feels more soggy than snowy this year, it’s absolutely that time  again, and so we’re back with a little bit of holiday musical cheer for you. I have been making these goofy music collections for 20 years now, and in all honesty this year’s mix might be my very, very favorite of all. And I don’t say that lightly either! See, when I’m putting these things together, I sometimes listen to the tracks dozens of times in a short span of time. Even with some good songs, the listener fatigue that sets in is very real.

But this year I just keep hitting repeat and starting over again. And though I’d love to take some piece of credit, I can’t. This mix is good because the artists made great songs and made putting it together a dream. I mean, let’s check some of these songs….

Early on in the mix, we’re hitting you with a snippet of an incredibly rare thing. Back around 1989 or so, Scott Miller of Game Theory recorded this goofy, sprawling thing called “A Child’s Christmas Saving The Whales” and sent the tape out to people on the band’s mailing list. It’s mostly spoken word narrative, and most of the jokes are pretty dated…but then in the middle of this thing the guy reveals some stunning musical geniusness by tossing off this 90-second song that I can’t imagine he didn’t mostly make up on the spot and then recorded to a cheap tapedeck in his bedroom. And the danged thing is just glorious even so.

And then there’s some JD McPherson. He put out a Christmas record this year called “Socks” which is the best album of all original Christmas – themed music since…ever. Really. It’s that good. This track is just a taste, but you should be spinning that record throughout the Christmas season.

Continuing, I know next to nothing about who Fascinations Grand Chorus is, other than I think they do a kind of indie dreampop thing. But their song is just a wallop of gorgeous, Spectorian production. And then there’s The Duke Spirit song. It starts off sounding like it’s a pretty OK song, and then you get to the chorus and there’s a key change and it’s goosebumps time and the track transcends into greatness.

There’s some familiar names all over this — you get a chance to put some Kacey Musgraves on your mix, you should do that, especially with Willie Nelson — including that Dean Martin track. He’s singing one of my favorite holiday-ish songs, and I can’t believe I’ve never used his original. Well, until now, anyway.  And you all know Kimberley Rew, even if you don’t realize you know him. Kim has all the hipster bona fides as Robyn Hitchcock’s songwriting foil in the legendary Soft Boys in the early 1980s, but when that band broke up, Kimberley went and started a new band called the Waves, wrote a certain song about strolling around on Sunshine, and I would imagine sits around collecting royalties for it.  Here he riffs on a goofy but typically memorable seasonal tune.

There’s other stuff here that should be less familiar. Whyte Horses are new, and their ebullient Christmas song would be juuuuust a little better if the verse melody wasn’t a note-for-note copy of The Replacements’ paean to bleak loneliness, “Swingin’ Party”.  And then there’s the Gabrielle Aplin & Hannah Grace song. I gather Ms. Aplin is famous-ish in some quarters for singing covers on Youtube. Which is a thing that people do now.  And so I was expecting “December” to bounce off me pretty hard. But holy crap, what a revelation that song is. It’s an original that suggests she or Hannah Grace or both of them need to be writing a lot more originals. And the arrangement is simply spectacular.  It’s rare that a song I’m expecting to hate leaves me with tears in my eyes by the first chorus, but there you go.

OK, I’ve yammered enough about the songs here. Only one or two repeats from previous years are on this mix as well, and I hope it brings to you and yours as much joy as its brought me to make. Merry Christmas, or Happy whatever holiday you choose to celebrate, even if it’s just some time off work or school!

As per usual, this is all one big MP3 file, with everything sequenced and mixed just so. You can stream it or save it to your own computer/device as you like.

Here’s the tracklist (Click the title to listen or “save as”):

1. “Jingle Bells/Welcome” – Esquivel

Whew, just enough time to get this year’s Christmas music mix down the chimney and into the ears of every (mostly) good little boy and girl on Santa’s list. 2017 has had its share of ups and downs, but for the season I’ll set the bad bits aside and focus on the merry stuff. 2017 has been quite good to me personally, so I hope some of my good fortune rubs off.

This year’s Christmas music mix feels a little bit more “indie” than previous years. As I kept wading through the folder of prospective holiday tunes I keep, I kept noticing that there were so many major, obviously talented artists who utterly mail it in when they try to do a Christmas song. There’s a songwriter’s trick for creating a song within a certain theme that involves the writer simply listing some things associated with the subject, and then using that to get some inspiration to write a song with.

Far too many holiday pop songs sound like that’s as far as the songwriter got. There’s an absolute glut of songs that open with either cheap winter wind sound effects or sleigh bells ringing (always a sign that you’ve got more of a bad Christmas cash-in than real song). That eventually moves to a singer spending a couple of verses singing a grocery list of Christmas-ish non sequiturs with as much fake emotion as can be mustered.

And so I found a lot of stuff like that. But then I also found a lot of stuff like The Spook School’s winsome post-breakup gloriousness,”Someone To Spend Christmas With”. I found a spot for Belle & Sebastian’s “Are You Coming Over For Christmas”, which starts off sounding like a a flirty-but-without-the-rapey-stuff take on the “Baby It’s Cold Outside” formula, but then turns into something utterly beautiful and transcendent. At least for this year, it’s the lesser-known artists who are bringing the feels.

That isn’t to say I didn’t find some old favorites bringing the heat. Whomever in Cheap Trick suggested they cover The Move’s Wizzard’s (we’re all Roy Wood anyway) “I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day”, that person is a genius, because this is inspired. And hey, it’s time the Ventures returned to this annual mix, but this time marrying The Zombies to Greensleeves with a surfy twang.

It was also fun to go diving back into my 1990s alt-rock roots a little bit. I can’t believe I’ve never used the Pixies before in a Christmas mix, but I just love Frank and Kim’s call-and-response on the coda of this Neil Young cover. I found a great spot for a Cocteau Twins take on an old familiar kid’s song from back in the day. And then there’s the Throwing Muses track. If Tonya Donnelly’s guitar riff on this doesn’t get you going, you may need to get your ears checked.

It is also both great to find a spot for a terrific new Minus 5 track, “A New Christmas Hymn” while at the same time hearing that Minus 5 main man Scott McCaughey has recovered well enough from his stroke two months ago to be able to play guitar and bass again. That’s the song that provides the title for this year’s mix, too. For all the shouty-ness of 2017, this feels like a good summing up of things:

I’m offering this Christmas hymn

Wherever and however the holiday season finds you in 2017, I hope it’s a happy one for you and your loved ones. I hope you enjoy this mix of rock, soul, funk and a little country, all mixed together as one long MP3, and that it helps provide a little more good cheer. Let’s cue this sucker up and hit play!

https://popnarcotic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/xmas17a.mp3

We’re All Skating On The Same Thin Ice (Popnarcotic Christmas Music Mix, 2017)  (Right click to download and save.)