Talking Yuletunes on All Things Considered

I didn’t put quite as much muscle behind promoting my yulemix this year as I have in years past, but I was very glad to get an invitation to talk to All Things Considered’s Ailsa Chang about some of the selections featured on my 2020 compilation, Four Seasons Total Greetings. The show suggested I choose three new-for-2020 recordings and one of the surprising deep cuts I uncovered in the prior year, which is how I got to talk about The Shades’ recorded-in-1966-but-eerily-topical “Prancer’s Got Some Red Spots” and also sneak a little bit of Canadian country singer Hank Snow’s “Christmas Wants” in at the outro.

We recorded this conversation in mid-December, and there was enough dire news in the days after that that I assumed this piece would be axed. It was my old boyhood pal Chip Goines who notified me, via Twitter, that the piece was airing on Christmas Eve, just as I was loading up to drive to my parents’ house in Virginia (after two weeks in quarantine) for the holiday. The bar for Christmas miracles has rarely been lower, but I’ll take it. God bless us, everyone!