Category: folk

Mall World: okay

After a time or two, kids are resigned to see the department store Santa. It’s just a job, after all.

Joshua Creek details the critical three-year-old’s concern about “Santa’s at the Mall.” This folk-grass strummer weighs down the youngsters with mythos angst.

Whit Hill and Latini steel guitar the rock blues in “Going with My Cousin to See Santa at the Mall.” Their lassitude is exceeded only by their drawl.

Who Cares Lights

Some of those modern singers lament their existential blues with bourgeois frippery in the periphery. Xmas lights? Whatever, the world’s a hole!

Urban rap takes this to heart, evidence MaRlo with “Christmas Lights.” Even if you get killed, man. Lights.

Swagkasper23 calls out the indifference of those “Christmas Lights,” even if he dies… Again rap for the loss.

Closed Heart Surgery rounds out our rap needs with “I Hope Christmas Lights Burn Your House Down.” I suspect girl troubles started it.

Young Statues echo alt “When the Lights Go Up” as a surrender to the inevitable.

Austin Hartley-Leonard dreams about being “Under Christmas Lights” as a symbol of emptiness (echo echo echo). Resigned maudlin folk.

WTF Lights

Sometimes the lights are in your face, all over the place, too fast to chase… and you can’t draw a bead on their meaning. It means that your meds aren’t working, or that lights have outgrown their symbolic roots and have become the new reality. Cope!

Monica hypnotically chants about Christmas night and how “I Saw Light.” I’d give it a BLUE ALERT if i could understand it.

Darlene Como similarly warbles and creates, now with fewer actual words, a strange world for the holidays with “Twisted Christmas Lights in Romantic India.” May i presume so much that all is not well here?

FoloSound colors outside the rap lines with a story of love(?) and heartbreak(?) (or just music) with “808s & Christmas Lights.” The 808s from aught i can gather is the electronic beat machine setting the rhythm here.

Eric Lichter gets coffeehouse beat poet in “Christmas Lights for Matadors.” This balletic word salad may yield to explication, but i’ll swim and sway happily regardless (mostly to the banjo parts). Fine alt-folk.

Fireplace Lights

We’ve embraced several light sources into our ragtag theme of Christmas Light Songs. So, why not the home’s hearth? It’s where the stockings are hung and Santa appears. And–the Yule log (which should be so dambig that you burn only part of it each of the twelve nights of Xmas)!

Dave & Jeannine rascal the country fiddlin’ for a bad recording “Put Out the Ol’ Yule Log.” Seems forgetting to darken the fireplace will cause some down home regret. Or some two-steppin’.

Black Oak Coven’s album The Homebrewed Book of Pagan Carols offers a “The Yule Log” song about blessed light in the home. It ain’t Christian, but it is holy. Medieval throat boxing.

That, natch, brings us to Prof. Peter Schickele’s “Throw the Yule log on Uncle John.” This parody of Dark Aged chorale ronds is great fun for all teen-aged ironists, including Emerald City Voices.

Also outre, Hot Buttered Elves get psychedelic garage with “Larry was a Yule Log,” in which the holiday centerpiece is anthropomorphized with horrifyingly danceable results.

Let’s retire with a sprightly folk pop piece about the fireplace in the work-a-day world. Sure I could include some random anonymous spoken word piece from the 1960s (hi-fi test album??) about how-to make a Christmas fire…

…but let’s cut instead to Joshua Hyslop’s “Winter’s Night.” The ambience is vibrant, and i’m pretty sure all is well in this world–thanks to the smoldering hearth.

Guiding Lights

Sometimes the light of Xmas isn’t JC born precisely, it’s something more nebulous. Believer’s choice.

Gordon Dills says it is GOD when grassroots tinkering over the tune “Christmas Candle (God’s Gift of Light).” But he is so slyly faith-based without name-dropping any saviors that i’ll include him here.

Laurie Berkner also bypasses that church/state line, so her kidsong “Christmas Lights” can be sung in schools without the kids legally praying. (Watch out for the fun-ness of her behind-the-scenes epilogue.)

“Light a Candle” is a song of giving and brotherhood and metaphor. Avalon does this pop with heavy gospel overtones.

“Light a Light” from Melissa Etheridge sings about a season of change. This secularism with holy symbolism has got my head on a swivel. But it’s potent and pretty folk pop.

Prayer Lights

We like to aim our prayers upward, but God’s everywhere right? Must be that glowing gaseous center of the solar system that acts as a relay station or sumpin.

“Every Light that Shines at Christmas” is the shouty gospel rafter raiser we’ve been expecting. Ernie Haase & Signature Sound add country rock rhythms to keep us salivatin’. Praise wattage!

Truth wants you to “Light a Christmas Candle” with their sax-driven country pop in order to honor, you know, everything.

The Robert Shaw Chorale ups the church factor with “Break Forth, O Beauteous Heavenly Light.” This is probably just that star we discussed last month, but I dig the part about putting Satan in his place with the light. Bazinga!

Kathleen Mikkelson alt-sermonizes with “Light Broke Through,” a strangely cynical take on doubters when the lights came on Christmas morning. Just look, everyone!

Manger Lights

Some awful Purdy music sees God-as-Man as light, especially around the holidays. We won’t sample every song which praises the big luminescence (which is a whole lotta the hymnal), but let’s tip that bushel and see a bit.

Point of Grace (feat. John David Webster) replaces Jesus with illumination in “Let There be Light” a showstopper of pop gospel.

“Candlelight Carol” mentions fires and stars and candles, so it’s taking the light of the Lord variously seriously. Mary Chapin Carpenter does this best with gentle folk observations.

Of the many, many “Light of the Stable” renditions I prefer the mighty grace of Emmy Lou Harris. That’s power folk music.

Plural Stars

Is it retinal burn? Parallax? Why so many points of light Christmas night? Shouldn’t there just be one?

The Star in the East gets a shout out, but “Great Big Stars” seems to elvate all elements of the first Christmas Eve to heavenly hyperbole. Elizabeth Mitchell swings this old folk song.

Piggybacking off ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ come The Peter Pan Christmas Players with “Praise Him All Ye Singing Stars.” That’s right, the stars all sing to HIm.

“Stars of Glory” might be hinting that every star is an angel, not just the one that spotlit the Baby J. I’m a fan of The Lower Lights folking up this gospel.

Also better unplugged, “Stars were Gleaming” which paints a landscape of that night, achieves divinity from simplification by Nancy Hanson & Kevin Corbett.