Twelve Songs of Christmas

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...

Americana artist Mindy Smith has been referred to on 12 Songs before. At some point in the COVID years I talked about my love of "Santa Will Find You" from her 2007 album My Holiday, and last year when I talked to The Indigo Girls, we talked about the song "It Really Is (a Wonderful Life,)" which they recorded. It turns out it was written by Chely Wright, but the only version I knew was Smith's from My Holiday. 

For me, this was an...

I've long believed that if you can't get a good interview out of the Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood, you should hang up your keyboard and mic. The Truckers are a richly layered project with the loud guitars and pounding drums used to drive a lot of meatheaded lyrics instead supporting subtle storytelling that deals class and race as well as rock 'n' roll. For much of their career, they've used their albums to come to grips with ...

Saxophone player Boney James has two Christmas albums, Boney's Funky Christmas and Christmas Present. Both make sense as the place where jazz and R&B meet, and that was transparently the case when he recorded his first album, Trust, in 1992.

We talk about those early years in addition to his Christmas music, and we discussed having an album of new music in the can that he wasn't at liberty to talk about or play. Since we record...

Our surf Christmas episode inadvertently laid the groundwork for this week’s, which focuses largely on Calypso Christmas music. New Orleans’ Charlie and the Tropicales released Presents for Everyone, an album of Calypso Christmas songs, in 2023.

This week I’m talking to trombone player and bandleader Charlie Halloran about the album, Calypso Christmas music, Mighty Sparrow, tiki bars, and being a working working musician in New Orl...

In 2021, I interviewed Tom Petersson of Cheap Trick, a band I've only grown to appreciate more over the years. They released their first three albums--Cheap Trick, In Color and Heaven Tonight--in 18 months, and Dream Police followed a whole year later. They toured constantly at the time, which makes that productivity all the more impressive. 

In 2017, they released a Christmas album, Christmas Christmas, an album that's easy to lik...

I don’t usually get to end a conversation on Christmas music with memories of radio legend Art Bell and his late night deep dive into the paranormal, After Dark with Art Bell. But that’s what happened when I talked to Mark Christopher Lee of the British lo-fi indie rock band The Pocket Gods. It took a lot of discipline not to end the show with After Dark’s theme, “Chase” by Giorgio Moroder. Instead, the episode ends with “Merry Chr...

Michela Mussolino introduced me to a new body of Christmas music this week. The New Jersey-born Memphis resident specializes in Sicilian folk music, and she recorded an album of predominantly Sicilian Christmas songs in 2022 on La Notti Triunfanti. 

We talk about how someone arrives at that specialty, the deep history behind some of these songs, and how moving to Memphis affected some of the songs on the album. 

In the episode, Mic...

I have so little surf Christmas music in my collection that I turned to WTUL DJ Hunter King, host of "Storm Surge of Reverb" to see if there was a substantial body of surf Christmas music. As I expected, the answer is yes. 

We talk about old and new Christmas surf, Hunter's relationship to Christmas music, and vinyl because it almost goes without saying that as a surf music fan, he's a vinyl guy.

In the episode, I mention my insane...

The new season of Twelve Songs starts with an interview with Thomas Mertz, one of the founders of the social media game Whamageddon. To win the game, you must go from December 1 to Christmas without hearing Wham!'s "Last Christmas." Hear it and you're out. People play on social media on the honor system, but for Mertz, the fun is in the way the game has created a community. 

Since he is in Denmark, he and his friends have a slightl...