Twelve Songs of Christmas

Occasionally over the run of "12 Songs," guests and I have talked about the UK competition to see who has the number one song on the charts at Christmas. Last year Marc Burrows wrote The Story of the Christmas No. 1: Mistletoe & Vinyl, and this year he has updated the book to cover how Kylie Minogue's "XMAS" topped the chart last year. 

In this episode, I mention the non-profit Cure4TheKids and their remakes of Band Aid's "Do They Know it's Christmas" and my interview with Midge Ure on the original "Do They Know it's Christmas." 

I've followed up the lead interview with one with musician Malcolm McNeill, who recorded "Number One This Christmas" under the name The Flaming Puds. He recorded it using AI, and we'll have more of the conversation focused specifically on that in an upcoming episode. Here's last year's episode on AI Christmas music. 

The episode ends with "Have a Cheeky Holiday" by the Cheeky Girls, and as I say during the episode, you really need to see the video to fully appreciate the weirdness of this song. 

I hope this will be the last week that "Twelve Songs" will be affected by my book project. I've returned this week to 2022 and an interesting conversation with scholar Derrick Bang about Vince Guaraldi and A Charlie Brown Christmas. We talked after the release of the Super Deluxe version of the album, which included most of the tracks recorded for the album, including ones that didn't get used and in some cases didn't get finished. For me, they helped me appreciate Guaraldi, particularly when you hear him stumble through passages that sounded effortless by the time he nailed them down. 

This week, Alex digs into vocalist/keyboard player Earl Grant's 1965 album Winter Wonderland. Grant's career was varied, starting with one of his biggest hits "The End" in 1959, then a successful version of "Bali Ha'i" in 1961.

Grant followed Earl After Dark (which featured "Bali Ha'i") with a decade of predominantly lounge/easy listening albums focused on his organ, before he died in a car accident in 1970 at the age of 39. 

Winter Wonderland falls in the middle of that run, when he released two or three albums a year. Alex talks about it as an album that fits into his life at Christmas time. 

In 2025, the veteran string band Old Crow Medicine Show released OCMS Xmas, the first Christmas album in their lengthy career. Last season, we ran part of our conversation with Ketch Sekor and Morgan Jahnig from the band about its relationship to Christmas music and the album they made, but we had so many interviews at the time that we could only run part of it.

This week, I can run it in its entirety, which I think is worth it because while the band loves its down-home sound, they're also students of the form and its history, so some real insights and personal moments slip into the conversation. I'm also always here for a band that doesn't hide its class consciousness.  

It helps that OCMS Xmas is also a very good Christmas album with a number of slyly smart touches throughout the album. 

Philadelphia's Slowey and the Boats revisit the late 1950s and early 1960s when a body of music emerged that celebrated Polynesia and tiki culture, even if the sounds had more to do with movies and the American imagination than the actual sounds of the islands. Isaac Stanford is Slowey, and with his lap steel, he and the band explore that body of music as well as songs inspired by Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, two of the American exotica heroes. 

Slowey and the Boats released Merry Christmas from Slowey and The Boats, Vol. 1 & 2 in 2020, and it's still on sale in digital and vinyl forms. Isaac and I talk about the band, the album, and we hear music from their most recent album, Slowey After Dark, which is also on sale now in digital and vinyl forms.

If you liked this episode or the body of exotica that it draws on, you may enjoy my 2013 episode on Christmas Cocktails, the series of lounge Christmas albums from Capitol Records' "Ultra-Lounge" series. 

Folk/country singer Stompin' Tom Connors flew the flag for Canadian culture starting in the late 1960s and continued to do so until he died in 2013. His music documented the people and places he saw traveling across Canada, and the best encapsulation of that project and his sound is Across This Land with Stompin' Tom Connors from 1973. It's online in its entirety for free on YouTube. 

In 1970, he released Merry Christmas Everybody, which is a very Stompin' Tom Christmas album. It's available in the digital marketplaces, but with songs added to it because, I suppose, 12 songs might be considered too few in the current market. The added songs are fine--"The Hockey Song" is a Stompin' Tom classic--but they're not part of the album as I know it. 

The new season begins with versions of Darlene Love's Christmas classic. We hear the song we've known forever and ones that I think offer an interesting twist on the original. The episode doesn't include the versions by U2, Years, and Jewel Scheme though I'm entertained by all of them, and if you like the versions by Death Cab for Cutie, Suede Silver, Liela Moss and Chicken Happen, you can find them on Bandcamp. 

The episode starts with "Secret Box" by Masato Saito, and in the episode I mention my interview with Scott Leopold, the host of the "Holly Jolly X'masu" podcast. 

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 [email protected]. 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.