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Filtering by Tag: yuletunes
"Featuring the fantastic organ artistry of Jimmy McGriff"!
Mr. McGriff, whose career spanned another 46 years after he played on Ray Charles' "I've Got a Woman" in 1961, died in 2008. I regret that I did not pay tribute to him on that year's collection, Santa Claus and Popcorn.
My best find this year. The songs more than live up to the sleeve's considerable promise. How had I never heard this, or even heard of this, before? You mofos been holding out on me.
I'll be fighting the temptation to over-represent it on the yulemix. Better to ration out its treasures over the coming years. I'm playing the long game, yulemixwise. But this one goes so deep I can afford to throw away good tracks like "Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy" here.
December 4th. And I've barely begun my yulemix. But I'm only three days late starting the Yuletunes Advent Calendar, wherein I will post one classic album cover each day until Christmas.
This one was part of my big Black Friday splurge, which came to just over $14. I got it in a dollar bin. For 15 percent off. There is a star to the east of Ho's face, yes. I wanted to show you the actual CD I got so you can see that it apparently once belonged to a cat named Bob Burger. C'mon, that's a little bit funny.
Anyway, can't talk. Yulemixin'.
Nick Lowe tells me he "was sort of snobby" initially when his label approached him about doing a Christmas album.
My interest in Christmas music could not be called casual, and I've long admired the songwriting of Nick Lowe, the onetime Jesus of Cool. So his first -- and probably last, but who can say? -- holiday album, Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family, is pitched squarely at me. I talked to him about it for Sunday's Washington Post.
It's my first Post byline in a good while. Nice to be back.
I don't have a Christmas tree in my apartment yet. My friends haven't seen me in weeks. My editors are all ready to fire me. I've been avoiding mirrors, but I assume I look like Ted Kaczynski.
It's all for a noble cause: Every November & early December I fall into a four-to-six week time warp attempting to create the funniest and most reverent, most entertaining and most beguiling Christmas mixtape possible. (You may have read the essay I wrote about this project recently in the Washington Post. If you haven't, please do.)
It
is my great pleasure to unveil now for your hall-decking enjoyment
entry No. 007 in my Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the future of Christmas merry-making
enforcement, Stay Hungry to Feed the World. In keeping with
the perpetually inflating ethos of this project, it's the longest one
yet. When it comes to Christmas, less is less. And more? Is just the most.
PLEASE NOTE: These are large files; each side is a little more than an hour long and they're encoded at high bitrates. It may take a minute or two after you click the play button for you to hear anything, but have faith.
I can't tell you how thrilled I was to learn one of my boyhood heroes -- seven-time Mr. Olympia, five-time Mr. Universe, living tissue-over-a-microprocessor-controlled-hyperalloy-combat chassis former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- was available and willing to serve as master of ceremonies for this year's yulmemix.
I don't like to brag, but Arnold and I have been friends for years, ever since he brought me in to do an emergency script polish on his 2001 action thriller Collateral Damage. NOW IT CAN BE TOLD.
Look, I don't need you to tell me that Collateral Damage, as released, is no Predator, or even -- let's be honest -- Raw Deal. All I can tell you is you should've seen the Ambien-shooter of a script they were going to make before I got there. It would've made Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life seem like, I dunno, Taylor Hackford's Proof of Life. (Full disclosure: I have never actually watched a film in its entirety that did not star Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
Anyway, Schwarz -- that's what his good friends call him -- and I got to be very close. We used to tease one another: "How much did you squat this morning?" And the answer was always, "How much did you squat?" Invariably the other person would reply, "I asked you first!" And then we'd both be like, "Let's both say it at the same time -- JINX!" And then we'd laugh until we wept.
I have fond memories of those long, languid Sunday afternoons when we'd ride our Harleys up the Pacific Coast Highway to Neptune's Net. Sometimes just for a laugh Schwarz would strip naked in the parking lot, then saunter into the bar, face down the 200-odd bikers inside, and announce, "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." And these tatted-up lifers would just be trampling one another to give him the keys to their hogs. I swear that Schwarz could never get one of these guys to fight him. He used to get really frustrated by that. I'd do my best to cheer him up: "Hey Schwarz, don't let it get you down man, you were Mr. Olympia for like 15 years. And we'll always have Collateral Damage." Except we didn't, really, not in the end. Hey, Andrew Davis had made The Fugitive. How were we supposed to know he would phone this one in?
But I digress. Schwarz was a big part of the success of my 2007 yulemix, Santa's Got a Big Old Bagge, so I was thrilled to offer him an expanded role here. The Austrian Oak favors us with his recollections and musings on success throughout the album. In celebration of his return, I have reprised a handful of songs from five years ago, but they only add up to about 11 minutes out of 130. When Rhett Miller very gamely agreed to sit for an interview about writing Christmas songs, how I could not play "Here It Is, Christmastime," the Old 97's (sic) yulejam that I first used upon its release in 2007?
LANGUAGE ADVISORY: This set has some. Lots, actually! Poetry and prose. But there're also a few stray F-bombs bandied about. Parental whatever whatevered.
Total Recall, Schwarz's revelation-packed autobiography, is in stores now.
NOW PLAY THIS CHRISTMAS LOUD! I command it! These halls ain't gonna deck themselves!
I'm so honored and excited I'm sweating. Yes, it's 70 degrees and muggy here in DC this December 4th, but it isn't the climate that has me -- svichting? Swatching? Whatever. It's the fact that Andy Cirzan, my yulemix-making senpai, sent me his 2012 Christmas mix CD.
When it comes to holiday mixtapes, I am a mere padawan to Cirzan's wizened Jedi master, dispensing ancient wisdom via oddly structured sentences he splashes around the swamps of Degobah. (He's from Chicago, actually.) As you may recall if you happened to read my recent Washington Post essay about my yulemix, the seventh installment of which shall drop forthwith, Cirzan has been issuing compilations of obscure and often inexplicable seasonal gems for more than 20 years.
Sound Opinions, the great WBEZ radio show and podcast that introduced me to Cirzan's noble work will -- if custom holds -- be posting his 2012 mix for free download later this month, so I won't spoil any of his selections. I will note with not a little pride, however, that two of the cuts on Cirzan's mix this year were already on my draft playlist for my 2012 mix before his collection got here today. Great minds obsess alike, or something. As always, there're some things on Cirzan's collection I've never heard before, and that I may yet steal for 2012.
Thanks, Andy.I was asked to provide a sidebar for my Washington Post essay (in today's Sunday Style insert, with Helen Mirren on the cover, which actually came out Friday) about making my annual yulemix. We didn't have room for my brief rationales for choosing the Twelve Songs of Christmas that I did, so I'm posting it here. Bow your heads and tremble before the Twelve Songs of Christmas!
(Not the twelve songs, as if there could be such a thing. Merely a dozen yule-sides that ring my Christmas bell, presented chronologically.) Read More
