Year-round Yuletide oddities
Future Clouds and Radar sorely wants us to take a trip back to Auntie Amanda’s troubles in “Christmas Day 1923.” This string-sobbing folk rock ballad rises and rises to a sad crescendo. Sorry for your loss.
Carolyn Arends goes for the three-hanky with the reverential “My First Christmas,” a folk song about a great grandparent, born in ’23, saved in ’44, passed recently. Each time was like her first time with the angels and the baby king. Take it from me, it works.
“December 1943” is soft folk/country from John Michael Montgomery. Two wandering soldiers in the woods leave war behind for a night in the grace of a solitary cabin. Then the Nazis show up…. (C’mon, Christmas!)
Defeater’s “December 1943,” on the other bloody stump, is a different outcome for soldiers in the unholy conflict. Screaming metal.
Perhaps more uplifting comes paternal shore leave for a sailor for a “Christmas in Pittsburg, 1943.” Boston Blackthorne commences Celtic, so it’s a sad tale of doom to be ‘cross the sea (Normandy). Sobering folk.
World War II raises its head, perhaps ironically, for the mashup of spoken, rebroadcast, and NewAge noodling that is Family Friend’s “Christmas, 1944.” Whut?
No-No Boy handcrafts historical plaints as songs. “Where the Sand Creek Meets the Arkansas River” at first seems to address the genocide of First Nationers, but the lines about a small marker: There is a date marked Christmas Day, 1944 and not even a name, Just Matsuda Baby point us in the direction of Japanese-American internment camps. Heavy duty folk.
Twist and clap! “Christmas 1974” from Silvery is whoa-ohh partying rocking something something fun.
McCarthy Trenching gets almost cowboy with his folksy reminiscent “Christmas 1974,” a snapshot of a young (lonely) bride and her DIY Christmas in a farmhouse somewhere. Spookily quaint. (Missing his mom…?)
Sometimes, the date is just another day. So what that it’s Christmas?
Jim White’s cowboy altrock “Christmas Day” is a bummer of a time to travel. He was crying in a Greyhound station on Christmas Day, in 1998, but saved by a mysterious loved one who took pity.
Kye Alfred Hillig, on the other metaphor, poses “Christmas 1998” as a straight shooting reveal about how you ain’t all that. Cowboy folk this time, but still hipster pop poetry. Just less concrete.
Simple lip service to when songs were written, produced, performed–whatever–doesn’t rate my countdown. Unless i’m desperate.
Pop-O-Pies takes “Christmas Time in Frisco – 2009” to task for filth, lawlessness, and rampant violence. Sparkly garage-lite.
The hipster poetry of “On Christmas Day the World Ended (2009)” got my attention. This Bosch painting of Xmas hell is a bad acid trip, or a great screenplay–or both! Celtic folk rock.
Tim Minchin’s what’s-it-all-about-anyway Christmas song “White Wine in the Sun” is folk pop wisdom which truly celebrates the agnostic aspects of a religious holiday. He doesn’t say NOT, he doesn’t say YEP, but he does like the excuse to get together–even with his daughter (whose birth is celebrated when the song was written 2009) who may LATER be nine thousand miles away and called upon to reunite as family. I mean, was JC home for his birthday every year?
“When U C Me” from K-Drama culture rap-ferences Christ and his Xmas with the wish list of ten thousand souls he’s putting on his hit list. City life is tough.
Ten thousand miles apart was the cruelest winter in Heaven, according to Gareth Moulton’s “Cloud Cover (The Boys).” Poetic misery by means of unplugged light rock.
A fascination with the “Fairy Lights” makes _Patrickconnor smile. Folk psychedelia touches upon ten thousand smiles on Christmas Eve, otherwise–huh?
“Christmas Eve” by Nickel Creek is a sad alt-rock breakup song for Xmas. He’s got ten thousand words to say–and hope–but they don’t help.
The Caroleers bring down the countdown with the observation of “Ten Thousand Santa Clauses (But Not One Gift for Me).” Kidsong with a caution: careful what you grasp for.
Hey Kye is eco-shocked to see so many Christmas trees mown down after procuring their own up high like “The Mountain Goats.” Folk guilt-inducement.
Barely Christmas, Mary Chapin Carpenter has an epiphany in the arrivals section of some airport (after being twenty thousand feet up and seeing city lights look like Xmas lights) in her airy folk masterwork “Transcendental Reunion.”
Rando hipster imagery in “Christmas Lights” decorate with must be up to a half a million of the incandescent buggers. J Church will be waiting a thousand years in the desert to make his point (?). Hard beaten folk.