Completing THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT!

Halldeckers! Merrymakers! Gay Apparel-donners! It’s been another exhausting journey, but my 2022 yulemix, The Airborne Yuletide Event, is now complete in its two-sided analog entirety. And I only cheated on the length a little.

Longtime listeners may spot nods to installments past here and there, because to neglect such a long and rich and long and storied and long history would be ungrateful, somehow. But the vast majority of these 103 minutes — 54 percent of the run-time of Avatar: The Way of Water by volume — are comprised of entirely new old material. There’re even four actually new, released-in-2022 yuletunes strategically sprinkled throughout this most festive and beguiling of sonic canvases.

Listen close, my dear ones, and listen loud. Merry Christmas.

ctklimek · THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVII [Side B]

Talking Christmas Songwriting on All Things Considered

Here I am with Rhett Miller at Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, Dec. 2018.

Christmas music has been an interest of mine for long time, obviously. My yulemix project is in its unfathomable 14th year, I wrote a Slate piece six years ago asking where the follow-ups to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” were (several complicated answers), and now that that last of the breakthrough secular holiday hits is 25 years old, I have at last gotten to bring this passion of mine to its natural habitat: The radio!

Rhett Miller’s band, Old 97s, has been a favorite of mine since I first heard them on KCRW in 2001; I’ve seen them play probably a dozen times since and for me and my pal Brian to sit down with Miller during their tour for their album Love the Holidays was a big thrill. Aloe Blacc’s Christmas Funk was my favorite new holiday release of 2018, and Molly Burch’s The Molly Burch Christmas Album is the one I’ve been spinning the most this year. I was happy to have comments from all three of these songwriters on my All Things Considered piece yesterday.

Yulemix 2012, Drop'd! It's time to Stay Hungry to Feed the World

I don't have a Christmas tree in my apartment yet. My friends haven't seen me in weeks. My editors are all ready to fire me. I've been avoiding mirrors, but I assume I look like Ted Kaczynski.

It's all for a noble cause: Every November & early December I fall into a four-to-six week time warp attempting to create the funniest and most reverent, most entertaining and most beguiling Christmas mixtape possible. (You may have read the essay I wrote about this project recently in the Washington Post. If you haven't, please do.)

It is my great pleasure to unveil now for your hall-decking enjoyment entry No. 007 in my  Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the future of Christmas merry-making enforcement, Stay Hungry to Feed the World.  In keeping with the perpetually inflating ethos of this project, it's the longest one yet. When it comes to Christmas, less is less. And more? Is just the most.

PLEASE NOTE: These are large files; each side is a little more than an hour long and they're encoded at high bitrates. It may take a minute or two after you click the play button for you to hear anything, but have faith.

Side A

I can't tell you how thrilled I was to learn one of my boyhood heroes -- seven-time Mr. Olympia, five-time Mr. Universe, living tissue-over-a-microprocessor-controlled-hyperalloy-combat chassis former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- was available and willing to serve as master of ceremonies for this year's yulmemix.

I don't like to brag, but Arnold and I have been friends for years, ever since he brought me in to do an emergency script polish on his 2001 action thriller Collateral Damage. NOW IT CAN BE TOLD.

Look, I don't need you to tell me that Collateral Damage, as released, is no Predator, or even -- let's be honest -- Raw Deal. All I can tell you is you should've seen the Ambien-shooter of a script they were going to make before I got there. It would've made Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life seem like, I dunno, Taylor Hackford's Proof of Life. (Full disclosure: I have never actually watched a film in its entirety that did not star Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

Anyway, Schwarz -- that's what his good friends call him -- and I got to be very close. We used to tease one another: "How much did you squat this morning?" And the answer was always, "How much did you squat?" Invariably the other person would reply, "I asked you first!" And then we'd both be like, "Let's both say it at the same time -- JINX!" And then we'd laugh until we wept.

I have fond memories of those long, languid Sunday afternoons when we'd ride our Harleys up the Pacific Coast Highway to Neptune's Net. Sometimes just for a laugh Schwarz would strip naked in the parking lot, then saunter into the bar, face down the 200-odd bikers inside, and announce, "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." And these tatted-up lifers would just be trampling one another to give him the keys to their hogs. I swear that Schwarz could never get one of these guys to fight him. He used to get really frustrated by that. I'd do my best to cheer him up: "Hey Schwarz, don't let it get you down man, you were Mr. Olympia for like 15 years. And we'll always have Collateral Damage." Except we didn't, really, not in the end. Hey, Andrew Davis had made The Fugitive. How were we supposed to know he would phone this one in?

But I digress. Schwarz was a big part of the success of my 2007 yulemix, Santa's Got a Big Old Bagge, so I was thrilled to offer him an expanded role here. The Austrian Oak favors us with his recollections and musings on success throughout the album. In celebration of his return, I have reprised a handful of songs from five years ago, but they only add up to about 11 minutes out of 130. When Rhett Miller very gamely agreed to sit for an interview about writing Christmas songs, how I could not play "Here It Is, Christmastime," the Old 97's (sic) yulejam that I first used upon its release in 2007?

Side B

LANGUAGE ADVISORY: This set has some. Lots, actually! Poetry and prose. But there're also a few stray F-bombs bandied about. Parental whatever whatevered.

Total Recall, Schwarz's revelation-packed autobiography, is in stores now.

NOW PLAY THIS CHRISTMAS LOUD! I command it! These halls ain't gonna deck themselves!

What Potter Stewart Said About Christmas

My essay about making my Christmas mixtape is in the Style section of yesterday's Washington Post, the pullout section with Helen Mirren on the cover. I was surprised how difficult I found it to write about this silly little project that's come to claim so many tens of hours of my time and creative energy every fall.

Here's an outtake:

To ask what constitutes a Christmas song is really to ask, what is Christmas? This is a loaded question, one that recalls for me what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography: “I really, really like it.”

No, of course I’m kidding. Stewart said “I know it when I see it.” I know a Christmas song when I hear one. Christmas is a Christian holiday, but it’s also a seismic economic event and a tradition-bound, nostalgia-spreading national art project. It’s a sparkly, brightly colored, tinsel-wrapped rorschach blot. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and if he died for my sins then it follows that it’s my party, too. I’ll put Tom Waits songs that make me cry on the soundtrack if I want to.

You can read the whole piece here. My Christmas mixtapes from 2009-2011 are posted on the Christmas Mixtapes heading by year.