Twelve Songs of Christmas

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 ...

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 Chris...

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 s...

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 ...

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: Th...

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, ...

We're in December now, and this week we have three conversations. William Shatner's face is on the pop culture Mt. Rushmore, and when I had a chance to interview him for The New Orleans Advocate in advance at his appearance at Pop Expo in town, I couldn't pass up the chance to ask him about 2018's Shatner Claus. It's a short interview, but I have it so you get to hear it. 

The interview begins with us talking about Y...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) made itself part of this year's music story with AI acts The Velvet Sundown, TaTa Taktumi and Breaking Rust making news one way or another. 

This week, Ken Kessler of the podcast The Sounds of Christmas and Gerry D from the Totally Rad Christmas podcast join me to talk about the way AI Christmas music foreshadowed some of this. We talk about an early effort created by University of Toronto research...

Multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory remembers playing and recording with Brian Wilson from 1999 until he retired from live performances in 2022. We talk about the recently reissued Brian Wilson: Live at the Roxy, Brian Wilson presents SMiLE, and his 2005 solo Christmas album, What I Really Want for Christmas. 

In the process, Gregory provides insight into the later stages of Brian's life and musical career, inc...

I started thinking about how to address Brian Wilson’s death on the podcast since we learned of his passing. “Little Saint Nick” and The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album are Christmas classics that needed to be addressed, but how or with who? The answer came when Oglio Records announced that it planned to reissue a 25th anniversary edition of Brian Wilson: Live at the Roxy. The promotional efforts behind that rel...

Toronto's Kristian Noel Pedersen has released 27 EPs or albums of Christmas music, 26 of which are on his Bandcamp page. What started as a goof became a project that stretched him as an artist. We hear music from all phases of his Christmas career including (in order):

1. "Home Alone Pt. 1"

2. "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis"

3. "All I Want for Christmas is You"

4. "A Step-Mother's First (and Worst) Christmas Ever"

5. ...

I've been out of town this week, and when I thought of an episode from the archives to revisit, this one from 2021 with guitar hero Steve Lukather came immediately to mind. It's useful to remember that this was the second year of COVID--not full lockdown, but a lot of precautions and a lot of staying home. I gather Lukather is or has been a social animal, and in a time when it was hard to be social, I was the fortunate beneficiary ...

Since streamed playlists and all-Christmas radio are the way most people hear Christmas music, they're fascinations of mine. This week I'm back on the radio beat with long-time radio guy Kevin Robinson. 

I wanted to talk to Kevin when I saw a post he wrote for the industry site Barrett Media on best practices for the all-Christmas format shift.  Since we talked, he interviewed me along with station programmers about progr...

Chris Murphy of the Canadian indie rock band Sloan describes them as "a cult band," but they're a cult band with legs. They started in 1991 and recently released their 14th album, Based on the Best Seller.

This week Murphy talks about how a band with kids and members in their 50s works, and what democracy looks like in a band. Murphy talks about the fake B-movie trailers the band shot to draw attention to songs from the new album, ...

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 vin...

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...

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...