Virtual Advent 2016: Favorite Christmas Albums

The Virtual Advent is hosted by Sprite Writes. You can check out all the Advent stops on Sprite's blog. Thanks for hosting again this year, Sprite!

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Usually for Virtual Advent, I share my favorite "not holiday" movies, but this year I decided to switch it up a bit and focus on something else I enjoy: music.

Back in the days before iTunes and listening to music on your computer, people listened to albums. While I'm A-okay with shuffling my 8,000-song library at any given time, when it comes to Christmas I still gravitate toward listening to one album at a time. Maybe it's because there's something nostalgic about it; maybe it's because holiday albums help set a mood where listening to a random selection of singles can't. Or maybe it feels like it slows life down just a bit to pick out an album and then pay attention to it instead of having a continuous loop of music playing.

Either way, I enjoy my Christmas albums, but of course I have some favorites that I thought I'd share to put you in the holiday spirit. Remember Christmas Day is only one week away!

The Little Drummer Boy: A Christmas Festival by the Harry Simeone Chorale

This was a record (an actual record; I still have it) that my grandparents owned and I was OBSESSED with when I was little. I would listen to it over and over and over. It basically tells the story of Christmas (the Jesus one, not like A Christmas Story) through traditional carols. It might seem strange that a young child would be that into a Christmas album like this, but what can I say. I was a strange kid. You can stream the entire album on YouTube.

A Christmas Together by John Denver and the Muppets

This is another childhood favorite. As a kid growing up in the '80s, of course I loved the Muppets, and my mom was a huge John Denver fan, so that was win-win for the whole family right there. My favorite songs on this one are Miss Piggy's rendition of Christmas is Coming, The Twelve Days of Christmas, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

You can also stream this one on YouTube!

A Holiday Celebration by Peter Paul and Mary

Another group my mom was really into was Peter Paul and Mary. This is probably why I love folk music today. Anyway, it's not Christmas without the PP&M Christmas album! I love the mix of unusual Christmas carols on this album, especially Light One Candle (which I guess isn't a Christmas song per se) and A Soalin'.

This is another album streamable on YouTube, you lucky ducks.

A Colbert Christmas, the Greatest Gift of All! by Stephen Colbert, et. al.

How do I love Stephen Colbert, let me count the ways. This album–and the Christmas special it comes from–is a pure, subversive delight from start to finish. A few of my favorite songs include Toby Keith's Have I Got a Present for You and John Legend's Nutmeg. Stephen and Elvis Costello singing There Are Much Worse Things to Believe In always makes me cry, because I am a sap.

Christmas with Weezer, by Weezer

If you're tired of caroling and want to put some electric guitar and drums into your holiday carols (and who doesn't), Christmas with Weezer is perfect! There appears to be several versions of this album available online, but it's short and fun no matter which you choose. I particularly adore their rendition of O Holy Night.

Christmas by Michael Bublé

I feel like I spent my entire adult life waiting for Michael Bublé to put out a Christmas album. Is that weird? Anyway, he finally did, and of course his voice is like butter and he's basically the Frank Sinatra of our time, so. You can stream it on YouTube, or! stream any of his annual Christmas specials as well.







What are some of your favorite Christmas albums?




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The Soundtrack for Our Dystopian Future

Arcade Fire is a band known for their complex production and thematic albums. 2007's Neon Bible was seen as a biting indictment of the Bush administration. Win Butler, the lead singer of Arcade Fire, said their latest album, The Suburbs, is a love letter from the 'burbs. But I see it more as dystopian YA literature gone musical.

Take, for example, the video for the title track, directed by Spike Jonze (above). The video features teenagers bumming around what seems like your typical, middle-class suburb (it was actually filmed in Austin, Texas), until empty houses and the puzzlingly strong presence of law enforcement hint that this isn't contemporary reality, and all is not well in this world. The lyrics support Jonze's interpretation, too: "When the bombs dropped we were already bored... Sometimes I can't believe it."

Track five, the catchy "Rococo," is almost universally thought to be about hipsters and how they really don't know what the hell is going on despite their painfully laid-back-and-ironic dress code. Yet if one reads it in reference to the art period Rococo--where the wealthy French aristocracy teetering on the brink of revolution commissioned playful paintings about love and sex--the song seems more of a warning against living in luxury while the world is torn apart around you, all because you can't be bothered to educate yourself beyond your own daily existence: "The modern kids... will eat right out of your hand/using great big words that they don't understand.... They seem wild/but they are so tame." Rococo (the word, not the song) is often interpreted to mean something along the lines of a decorative shell in French, and indeed the kids in Arcade Fire's "Rococo" are the vanguard of a culture that's nothing but a shell, with no life behind it with which to bring meaning or consequences to the kids' actions.

The interactive video for "We Used to Wait" takes the viewer to his or her hometown street and destroys it with a mushroom cloud-like accumulation of hundreds of trees, nature taking back a settled landscape. Both "Half Light II (No Celebration)" and "Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains)" talk about the death of wild places, dreams, and the imminent demise of their protagonists. Take this set of lyrics from "Half Light II":

Though we knew this day would come
Still it took us by surprise
In this town where I was born
I now see through a dead man's eyes

One day they will see it's long gone...

And, in the band's blog, the latest post contains a link to the Georgia Guidestones, a Stonehenge-esque monument inscribed with instructions, in several languages, on how to recreate civilization after the apocalypse (one quote from the Guidestones I just have share: "Prize Truth-Beauty-Love-" and books!?!).

I'm not a huge reader of dystopian YA, but I can see The Suburbs working as the soundtrack to Stephenie Meyers' The Host or The Adoration of Jenna Fox. Furthermore, Anaraug, who is very knowledgeable about such things, says that two of tracks reference William Gibson's Sprawl Anthology, which is a series of dystopian novels. But Arcade Fire's Suburbs talks about growing up in the suburbs even among its destruction, which gives the album a distinctly YA flavor of dystopia.


Do you know of any other bands or artists who have incorporated dystopian literature into their work?

Fuck You--A Censorship Dilemma

The catchy new single from Cee-Lo Green presents a problem for radio.  It's a good song.  People want to listen to it.  BUT over half of it consists of fuck, shit, and other things you can't say on the radio (for, as we all know, even though kids don't actually listen to the radio anymore, stations still can't play songs with bad words on the off-chance impressionable children will hear them from someone other than their parents and siblings).  To further complicate things, the song's meaning is most certainly lost if you censor it.

The solution can go two ways:  erase the words from the song or replace them.  The former gives it choppy feel ("I see you driving round town with the girl I love, and I'm like, ...you! Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!"), but at least there's some sense of maintaining artistic integrity.  The latter might be considered the best option, but what word do you replace fuck with?  I've heard "forget," which has two syllables instead of one, and doesn't have the same piquant sentiment--so, it really doesn't work.  What other words could they use?  Maybe they could go all BSG and use frack! 

On top of that comes the problem of what to do with the word shit.  As the fuck issue has already used up too much thinking for most music executives, the consensus seems to be to just replace it with, "shhhh."  This is even more annoying than "forget" ("If I was richer, I'd still be with ya--now ain't that some shhhhhh?"  Ain't that some shhhh?!?!  UHG).

Of course, the alternative would just be not to play the song at all, or to play it with the regular lyrics.  But that would make the world explode, so let's not do that.

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Musical Notes: Darkfever & Flat-Out Sexy

Image by suchitra prints

After reading Memory's post about music and reading the other day, I realized that while I do love to set books to soundtracks, I rarely remember what music I pick out to accompany them. That gave me the idea to add a "musical notes" section to my blog.

Here's the music that has been accompanying my reading this week:

Darkfever

One would think I'd go for Irish music with this one, since it's set in Dublin, but I actually found the mix of sexuality, cynicism, romanticism, and good vs. evil that populates Leonard Cohen's music to be more appropriate. Here are two of my faves:

Wow, Leonard Cohen is really old!

Flat-Out Sexy

I'm also reading Flat-Out Sexy by Erin McCarthy (review forthcoming). With a NASCAR-set book and a Southern hero, how could I resist listening to some country music?

Do you like to listen to music while you read? What songs have you been setting to books this week?

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Angelic Songs

Hi.  I'm lazy.  So instead of writing an actual blog today, I'm going to present you instead with a bunch of angel songs.

Did I miss one of your favorite angel songs?

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A Different Drum

What kind of drum do you march to, or do you?
NanLou4

From the Florentine Codex: Aztecs sing and dance to percussion instruments.  The long, narrow drum on a stand at the right foreground is a teponaztli.

If I did travel to the beat of a drum (and had any sense of rhythm), I think it would be the teponaztli.  Drums are the oldest form of musical instrument, and have significant mythological and spiritual connotations in many cultures.  In Aztec mythology, the teponaztli was a spiritual being who had been exiled temporarily to earth.  It was made out of fired wood and had a deep, resonating sound.  The Aztecs played it by beating on it with rubber-tipped hammers, carved into shapes of animals or humans.

Teponaztli drums from the American Museum of Natural History, about two feet long.

The drum was strongly connected to language:  it was used to send messages in the middle of battles, and played in accompaniment to poetry readings.  In fact, some Aztec poems contain the sound of the drum within the poems themselves (e.g., otocoto tototo cototo tiquititi titiqui tiquito).  Because of this, modern people can actually play Aztec music!  (To hear some samples, check out Phil Tulga's website.)

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Music Mondays

As some of you might know, I've been slightly obsessed with jazz music since I was eight.  If you also happen to like jazz, I can't recommend Melody Gardot's new album, My One and Only Thrill, enough.

One of my mom's friends, who was a professional jazz singer in a former life, described Gardot as a chanteuse, and that is extremely apt.  Her voice is absolutely great--able to stand up to the greatest jazz singers like Sarah Vaughn, Helen Merrill (one of my favorite singers of all time), or Etta James. 

Meanwhile, the songs on the album are perfectly written and beautifully produced by Larry Klein (the same guy who produced Joni Mitchell's jazz album, Herbie Hancock, and Madeline Peyroux, among others).  The songs have the timeless quality of Gershwin standards, while the production is very early-sixties in feel.  I could see this as a soundtrack to a film noir or a stylish romantic comedy set in Paris á la Funny Face or Charade. 

Although Gardot's last album, Worrisome Heart, was good(ish), it didn't have the focus and sound of My One and Only Thrill, which is like a perfect slice of time captured into memory and put to music.  It's lovely, haunting, and completely sucks you in. 

For a sample, there's a video of Baby I'm a Fool on YouTube.  The video itself is awful--it looks like a Calvin Klein fragrance or diamonds are forever commercial.  But you can get an idea of how the rest of the album sounds, at least.

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