Musical Advent Calendar: Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog, 2013

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We're going in a radically different direction with today's Musical Advent Calendar selection, debuting the cover of a classic Christmas record yet-to-come.

That would be the eighth in my unstoppable series of holiday mixtapes, Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog. My only real goal for this to staunch the 2009-2012 trend of these things getting steadily longer -- last year's installment weighed in at a truly obnoxious 130 minutes, only two minutes shorter than the classic holiday movie Die Hard. Which is not to say I wasn't proud of the goddamned thing. I was.

Anyway, that grand ambition of brevity flowered only, uh, briefly. When it drops in a week or so, my new yulemix will be another feature-length epic to comfort and amuse you through your car trips, your long layovers, and your interminable sleepless nights of loathing and regret. I think you'll really dig it. Merry Christmas!

Musical Advent Calendar: Christmas with McGriff, 1964

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"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.

Musical Advent Calendar: Christmas with Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, 1965

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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.

Musical Advent Calendar: The Don Ho Christmas Album, 1967

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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'.

The Little St. Nick Lowe, or (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Boughs of Holly?

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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.

(Invasion) Hit Parade: Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, annotated.

Elvis Costello at Lisner Auditorium, Friday, Nov. 22, 2013. (Francis Chung for DCist)

Has it really been more than two years since I last saw Elvis Costello play and felt compelled to write footnotes, basically, on all the curiosities in the set? The calendar does not lie. I've seen Costello perform probably 20 times since 1999, but I'd never seen him do a headlining solo set, as he did Friday night at Lisner Auditorium.

Because no one demanded it, I posted some notes over at DCist, where it's been so long that I don't even have my own login anymore. The post features great photos by Francis Chung, who took the one above. For an overview of the concert, the great and good Dave McKenna captured it well in his Washington Post review.