Twelve Songs of Christmas

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 yea...

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 beau...

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 Jack...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 m...

A new season of Twelve Songs begins with a conversation that is, frankly, more about AI—artificial intelligence—than it is Christmas music, but since we’re six months from the holiday, it seems like a good time for this conversation.

Last year, I interviewed Steven Wilson of the British prog rock band Porcupine Tree about “December Skies,” a song he recorded on his own with lyrics written in part by Chat GPT, an AI program. We talk...

Season seven of 12 Songs comes to a conclusion with three very different conversations and artists. Ha-Sizzle is one of the finest examples of the New Orleans-specific brand of hip-hop known as bounce. I talked to him about his Christmas in New Orleans in front of a live audience. 

The members of the British punk band Goddammit Jeremiah talk about their irreverent approach to Christmas and Christmas music and share a few of their h...

We're approaching Christmas, so this week I have excerpts from longer interviews that I'll run at full length next season. Steven Wilson is the driving force behind the British art rock band Porcupine Tree, and last year on a challenge he used artificial intelligence to write a Christmas song, something he felt that he couldn't do on his own.

The whole conversation goes deep on the relationship between artists and AI, and the odd e...

We're officially in December, the Christmas season, and I have more interviews than I can get through in the weeks leading up to Christmas. From here on in, I'll run excerpts from the interviews I've done, and I'll run them in their entirety next season. 

This episode starts with some clean-up business after last week's conversation with Midge Ure on "Do They Know it's Christmas." I referenced Ed Sheeran's complaint that he would h...

Midge Ure from The Rich Kids, Ultravox and Visage co-wrote and produced "Do They Know it's Christmas" 40 years ago this week on November 25, 1984. He recently released a new live album, Live at the Royal Albert Hall 04.10.23, so we talked about that, touring, the Blitz club and his memories of the sessions for "Do They Know it's Christmas." 

In this episode, I talk a little more than usual to contextualize the song and the intervie...

Husband and wife duo Dean & Britta have a sound that suits contemporary Christmas music beautifully. They've done a few movie soundtracks including 13 Most Beautiful, an album of songs commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum to perform songs beneath Warhol's silent films shot between 1964 - 1966. 

Their sound is evocative but spare, with deeply reverbed guitars and melodic touches that bring '60s scenes to mind without being stu...

Twelve Songs goes to Las Vegas this week, first to talk with Sally Olson and Ned Mills of the tribute act Carpenters Legacy about The Carpenters and their Christmas music. This year, they took their affection for both subjects to the natural conclusion and recorded "Christmas Time with You," a Christmas song made in the mold of the Carpenters. 

After that, I talk to comedian and ventriloquist April Brucker, who released a song sung...

Earlier this season, I interviewed The Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood about his ambivalent relationship with Christmas music. This week I talk to the Truckers' long-time guitarist Jay Gonzalez, who takes a different path to a similar place. We talk about his relationship to the band as a full-time member since 2008 who isn't Hood, Mike Cooley, or long-time drummer Brad Morgan, and his love of Christmas songs that might or might ...

I've been out of the country, so this week is an encore presentation with two very different artists--pop instrumental piano player Jim Brickman and Jeff Plate, the long-time drummer for the arena rock band Trans-Siberian Orchestra. When I conducted these interviews in 2020, I was really interested in how COVID-19 would affect two acts that have made holiday season tours a meaningful part of their business. I could imagine Brickman...

This week I'm talking with blues artist Jontavious Willis, who recently released his album West Georgia Blues. 

I wanted to talk to Jontavious not because of his Christmas music--he doesn't have any yet--but because he's doing something that I've been trying to pay attention to as people make contemporary music in traditional forms. We go a little longer with Jontavious talking about the blues in general to help get at that thought...

This season has featured surf Christmas music, calypso Christmas music, Sicilian Christmas music and smooth jazz Christmas music, so it can't be too much of a surprise that we finally get to Cajun Christmas music. I think Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys are an important band as they picked up the work of maintaining endangered musical traditions that was started by a generation before him, and he influenced the generation that f...