Retiring these Chestnuts

"I get so tired of listening to the Black Eyed Peas. It's rock music for those who don't like rock, rap for those who don't like rap, and pop music for those who don't like music." 

- Robert California, The Office

Often, I feel the same way about Christmas music. Don't get me wrong. I love the festivities. I love much of the happiness. I love the sacred and profane songs that celebrate (or intimate) this time of the year. But there are so many songs that we hear pumped through the loudspeakers and car radios while going about our business (especially if our business consisted of going through retail businesses). So much of the songs and the interpretations of the songs (and the spoofs of those songs, or the novelty songs) are so bad, I just don't want to hear them again. They actually make Christmas a bit less joyous for me.

But I know that I'm not alone in this feeling. So I conducted in an informal survey via Facebook.  Of roughly eighty responses (most people voted for more than one song), these were the Top Tiring Songs of the Christmas Season:

• Grandma Got Ran Over by a Reindeer (17 hits) 
• Please Daddy Don't Get Drunk this Christmas
• Rocking Around the Christmas Tree
• I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus
• Santa Baby
• I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause
• Little Drummer Boy
• Jingle Bell Rock
• Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
• Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
• Happy Holidays
• Christmas Shoes (Edit. Overlooked this purportedly awful song)
• Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire
• 12 Pains of Christmas
• The Little Christmas Stocking with the Hole in the Toe (1 hit)
• Baby It's Cold Outside (ditto)

Now, let's follow that up with two questions.
First: What Christmas or holiday songs aggravate you? You just want to stuff them back into the closet of mediocrity or drown them in the pool of horrible dreams and forget about them. Let their names never be spoken of again.
Second: What Christmas or holiday season songs still send shivers down your spine - in a good way, that is? It could be a song or an album, or a particular version of a song.
An example for me, despite the obvious - Vince Guaraldi's theme music for the Charlie Brown Christmas special - I would have to say is Sufjan Steven's "O Come, O Come Emanuel."

Music that Gets Us Through: All I Need to Alone

All I Need - Al Green (is there live footage out there somewhere? And if not, WHY THE HECK NOT?)

All I Need - Radiohead (oddly enough, the Radiohead song was released first. but this is a phenomenal video, imo.)

All I Want Is You - U2

All In - The Grouch & Eligh (with Pigeon John)

All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem

All My Love - Led Zeppelin

All of Me - Billie Holiday

All Right - Adam Again

All She Ever Wanted Was Love - Big Faith (Mark Heard tribute)

All that I Am - Undercover

All the Hype - Five Iron Frenzy

All the Mercy We Have Found - Vigilantes of Love

All the Time - StarFlyer 59

All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands - Sufjan Stevens

All the Way - Frank Sinatra

All the Way to Heaven - Swirling Eddies

All Those Expectations - Peter Bjorn and John

All Too Soon - Mark Heard

All You Lucky People - Adam Again

All You Need Is Love - Beatles

Almost Threw It All Away - Charlie Peacock

Alone, Together - Strokes

Alone... - Pigeon John

I'm a bit taken aback by how many largely OOP songs aren't available for mass consumption via youtube now (which is weird and is the opposite effect of just a couple years ago, let alone five years ago when Youtube was birthed. Big ups to the site and to those who find and post the hard-to-finds, especially the concerts).

So, what else have we been up to?

Just this...



and some of this...

Heard about Heard? (hyuck-hyuck)

Finally getting around to listening to Sufjan Stevens' Illinois (Also known as Come on Feel the Illinoise - yep, a pun, and being a native Illinoisian, a bad one. Please, people, don't pronounce the 's.') Lovin' it. My man Adam has a... I don't know what you'd call it. Maybe you could call it a post. Anyway's he wrote a post on Monday where he reveals that he's been listening to too much folk-rock.

Gross...I fell headlong into folk rock...been listening to a lot of keaton simmons and denison witmer and Over The Rhine and Nick Drake and Sufjan Stevens <---his voice grates my nerves in large doses...

I kid you not. The night previous to this, I put in the order for some old Over the Rhine and new Stevens and Witmer. I also got Mark Heard and Bill Mallonee (not the Godfather of Bluegrass, but the man behind the Vigilantes of Love). I'm somewhat responsible for getting him on this trip. It's a good break from his sola rapa christiana dogma. I plan on getting some Bowie next (why I don't have anything from him yet boggles my mind). But then maybe Nick Drake won't be such a bad idea. Simmons, though? Too many weird Simmonses out there for my taste.

I'm spinning Sufjan's stuff for the first time. I'm liking it a lot. Even the voice. Maybe I'll give some short reviews later, after they've soaked in. (I don't have quite the demand others do for Cross Movement reviews, so I have to create the demand first, right?)

But I do want to speak of Heard's poetic lines, since I am familiar with those. They certainly put me to shame. Mark Heard died thirteen years ago. He was an engineer, producer, musician, thinker, artist, writer-extraordinaire and pretty darn funny. On Satellite Sky he had the privilege of working alongside David Raven (of the Swirling Eddies), Michael Been (the leader of The Call), Buddy Miller (Emmylou Harris' guitarist, and with wife Julie, right hand), and Sam Phillips (Singer-songwriter, T-Bone Burnett's ex-wife). Bruce Cockburn speaks indelibly high of him. But this is what I know. These dang, haunted lyrics.

There's an oasis in the heat of the day
There's a fire in the chill of night
A turnabout in circumstance makes each a hell in its own right
I been boxed in the lowlands, in the canyons that think
I been pushed to the precipice and dared not to blink...
Knock the scales from my eyes
Knock the words from my lungs
I want to cry out
It's on the tip of my tongue
(Tip of My Tongue)

I will rise from my bed with a question again
As I work to inherit the restless wind
The view from my window is cold and obscene
I want to touch what my eyes haven't seen
But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants 'til our pockets are clean
'Til our hopes fall 'round our feet like the dust of dead leaves and we end up looking like what we believe
We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones and blow a hymn to the orphans of God
(Orphans of God)

And, in case you think it's all sad-sack, Heard does recognize beauty-lost ("Long Way Down," which argues that the naked beauty of the world is "lies hidden on the teeming shores beneath the burned-out Chevrolets") and beauty-lived :

Scarlet is the color of her heart against the night
Prism of her innocence fracturing the light
She will take her stairwell down to dark and heartless streets
And spend her season singing songs to infidels and thieves
("Love Is So Blind")

Buy yourself a copy. Let's not bury this treasure. Send it sky-high.

Sorry this post wasn't funny either.
What's wrong with me??