Talking Christmas Songs on HuffPost Live

The impromptu talking tour that has grown, to my surprise, out of my Slate piece from last week asking why it's been a generation since we admitted any new songs to the Christmas pop canon, marches on. I was on HuffPost Live earlier today for about 20 minutes, part of a webcam panel hosted by Nancy Redd that included Huffington Post social media fellow Ryan Kristobak and -- this was exciting -- Walter Afanasieff, the man who co-wrote "All I Want for Christmas Is You" with Mariah Carey.

The video doesn't seem to be embeddable, but you can watch the segment here. You'll see my head bobbing around distractingly -- useful in boxing, less so in on-camera interviews. You'll also get a nice look at my girlfriend's mom's spoon collection in the background. 

Webcam conferences are always a little dicey. You're contending with wildly variable video and audio quality, unpredictable transmission delays that create awkward pauses in the conversation and make it difficult to tell when the other party or parties have finished speaking, and frequently, unsynchronized sound and image. Allowing for all that, I think this went reasonably well.

Walter had just finished a point about the incongruity of sunny Los Angeles Christmases when Nancy called the segment to a close. Bad timing! I'd read only yesterday in Jody Rosen's terrific book White Christmas about how Irving Berlin's eponymous Christmas song, the most popular of all time, has originally opened with a verse about that very thing -- Christmas in Beverly Hills -- that Berlin ordered removed from the sheet music after Bing Crosby's chorus-only version in the 1942 film Holiday Inn proved to be definitive. Walter teed up the perfect opportunity for me to share this fascinating story, but the bit ended before I could.

I've got another handful of radio and podcast appearances coming up between now and Christmas Eve. I'm grateful for all the practice I'm getting forming sentences in real time. I'll try not to repeat myself too much.

Concerning the Death of Ray Price

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"Well, if I’m going to go out, I’ll go out singing." Ray Price, 1926-2013.

I was waiting to board a plane at Reagan National Airport this morning, operating on about two hours’ sleep, when the Washington Post‘s J. Freedom du Lac, who used to assign me music reviews back when he was the paper’s pop music critic, Tweeted me the WashPo’s obit of country legend Ray Price.

Price’s death had been falsely reported by his son over the weekend, but as I read Terence McArdle‘s thoughtful summing up of Price’s extraordinary life, it quickly became clear he really had left us this time.

I'm quoted briefly in the story, from my review of a 2007 concert that featured Price, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard, touring together as The Last of the Breed. It was a great show. I brought my dad along as my plus-one. "I'm 81 and I ain't quit yet!" Price told us on that evening six years ago.

Anyway, I was honored. R.I.P, Ray.

The Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2007

Presenting my 2013 yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!

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Annotated track list TK, but like James Brown says early in the set, Don't Be Hungry -- the latest and longest installment in my Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is live for your hall-decking pleasure now right here.

I've recontextualized a handful of old favorite tunes and clips from prior sets, but despite its formidable length -- a few minutes longer than Die Hard, but still a few minutes shorter than The Avengers -- the overwhelming majority of this one is stuff I've never compiled before. And as usual, I've already got a stockingload of outtakes I'll be mulling over again for possible inclusion next year. It was agony to lose the "Cowboy Santa Suite" from Side B, but take it from a guy who spends a lot of time seeing theatre: Act Two cannot be longer than Act One; that's just a gross violation of the social contract of art-making. Try it and the audience will turn on you.

My only real goal this year was to keep the mix short and tight. An hour seemed reasonable. Hey, Peace on Earth sounds reasonable, too. May this keep you in good company on your long road trips and flights and sleepless nights.

Thanks as always to the great Andy Cirzan for stirring my interest in "holiday obscura" with his annual appearances on the great WBEZ radio show and podcast Sound Opinions.

FURTHER READING: My 2012 Washington Post essay about my annual yulemix project. My Post piece from a few weeks ago about Nick Lowe's terrific new Christmas album, Quality Street. And my Slate essay from last week that ponders why it's been a generation since we admitted a new song into the classic yule-pop canon. That last one got me invited on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper last week! They haven't posted video of the segment, unfortunately -- I put on a sport jacket and combed my hair and everything -- but you can read a transcript here if you want.

Merry Christmas!

Sounds of the 60s: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, reviewed.

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Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Bethany Anne Lind, Tess Malis Kincaid, and Tom Key in Arena's Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. (Teresa Wood) 

If you don't know what to get your playgoing (or at least not-theatre-averse) parents for Christmas, and you can afford the freight, Arena Stage's Malcolm-Jamal Warner-starring Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and the Shakespeare Theatre Company's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum are both good revivals of 1960s items that they're likely to enjoy.

I liked them, too. But then, I'm big on the music, movies, and TV of the 60s. I review both in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

Musical Advent Calendar: On Her Majesty's Secret Service Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1969

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The soundtrack album for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the once-reviled 1969 James Bond film that's enjoyed a critical reappraisal among fans in recent decades, isn't a Christmas record, true. But the film, which starred George Lazenby -- a handsome and hardy but unengaging Australian model with no prior acting experience -- in his single appearance as 007, is set at Christmas. 

Its soundtrack features some of the best music in the entire 50-year franchise. You've got John Barry's kinetic opening title theme (reprised in Brad Bird's The Incredibles, among other places). You've got its elegiac love theme, "We Have All the Time in the World," with lyrics by Hal David, beautifully sung by Louis Armstrong.

And until a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realize that you've also got Nina's (whose?) "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?"

With its crisply annunciated Julie Andrews-style lead vocal and creepy childrens' choir, it would seem more at home in, say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (written by Bond creator Ian Fleming) than in a Bond joint. It's lack of suitability for its original context makes it a perfect fit my annual yulemix, which I have this year decided to call Children Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog. I have my reasons.

Matt Mira and Matt Gorley just posted the OHMSS episode of their terrific James Bonding podcast last week. Highly recommended.

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.