Twelve Songs of Christmas

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 adv...

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...

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 M...

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 w...

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...

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 musi...

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 beh...

Producer and multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee has a history of making recordings that hover uncertainly in time. Sounds from different eras and genres come together in his music to sound like lost, regional 45s.  We talk about his influences--library music and hip-hop--as well as his two Christmas albums:  A Very Ping Pong Christmas  from Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra (2007) and Kung Fu Christmas...

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 F...

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 socia...

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 stat...

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 att...

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 v...

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, creatin...

The headlines tell a version of the story:   “MARIAH CAREY SUED AGAIN OVER ‘ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU’ — BY THE SAME GUY,” according to Billboard.   “Mariah Carey is SUED AGAIN over All I Want For Christmas Is You... as two writers claim her 1994 classic is a ripoff of their song of the same name” according to The Daily Mail.   “Mariah Carey Sued By Random Man For Allegedly Stealing ‘All I W...

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 i...

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...

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...

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 tu...

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...

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...

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 Christm...

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 b...

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...

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 cont...