[Video: Steve Martin, Edie Brickell, and the Steep Canyon Rangers, “The Strangest Christmas Yet.” You can pop open a transcript of the lyrics here.]
Want to visit the pages for earlier playlists, which include videos, other songs, and some background material not in the “official” current list? Here y’go:
2008 | 2009 | |
2010 | 2011 | |
2012 | 2013 | |
2014 | 2015 | |
2016 | 2017 |
As always beginning in 2008, I’ve added ten new songs; the list therefore now includes 110 songs (well, the first just a scrap of dialogue). Total time required to listen to the whole thing, start-to-finish: now just shy of six hours. This means that — unless you’re interested in only this year’s ten — the best way to play the whole things is in random order, as background so to speak. Here’s the magic button to do that: click on it, and the mix pops open in a separate little window, and will start to play automatically (if you’re not happy with the order, close the pop-up window and click the button again):
Pop Out to Shuffle!
Alternatives, if you don’t want the randomized sequence:
A plain old chronologically-accurate playlist — no pop-up and no random sequence, just start to finish (although you can open it in a pop-out window by clicking (duh) the little “Popout” button at the top left):
A Quirky/Eclectic Christmas Mix (Complete)
…and here are the ten 2018 selections only. As with the complete list, this player just runs through the songs in sequential order, with no shuffle mode:
A Quirky/Eclectic Christmas Mix (2018 Only)
In any case, or even if you don’t want to listen at all, you might want to glance at the complete current list of song titles and performers. (Note: this is just a listing; you cannot play music from it.)
Now — not that you’re actively wondering — why the “recommended” method of listening (pop-out and shuffle, using the special link so labeled above), rather than listen to the songs in order? Well, as I said, this is the eleventh year for which I’ve done a Christmas-music post. Two specific implications of this fact (cribbed, almost verbatim, from last year’s post):- In that time, I’ve started exhausting the back catalogue of music I remember from days gone by, and have begun to rely on suggestions from other sites, on songs newly discovered from artists or albums I’m not familiar with, and so on. So you’ll find that the selections over time have shifted from the old standbys, to the somewhat more
quirkyeclectic end of the spectrum. For my taste, this will eventually make each year’s list too uniformly unfamiliar… and whatever else might be true about the holiday, I value the familiar! - I’ve also developed a practice of trying to balance each year’s music among songs of different types. For instance, I’ve taken to juggling the more recent selections to include both old and new artists/performances; performances by men and women; instrumentals and vocals; “edgy” and/or energetic vs. quieter and/or contemplative renditions; shorter vs. longer songs; and so on. Mixing up the complete list via shuffle mode will distribute these properties much more evenly over time.
- Finally, I like the idea — even if just imagined — that you can visit RAMH, pop out the playlist, close your other browser windows, and just set the thing going via remote speakers or headphones while you pursue other holiday matters: hanging decorations, cooking, partying…
And now… on to the wool-gathering!
Every year, just assembling a slate of potential candidates for this mix involves dozens of small but excruciating decisions. Not only do I scroll through a by now enormous* list of winter-holiday music already available to me in some form. And then, then comes the hard part: narrowing the slate of possibles to ten. And one ultimate test, listenability, almost always brings me to the year’s final cut.
One man’s listenability is another man’s Muzak, of course, and yet another man’s noise — none of which so much as glances at the tastes of the other 50% of the populace. But after I myself have listened to the candidates more than a couple times, some of them almost start screaming at me: I’m a clever song, but who would ever want to hear me repeated twice in the same hour?!? And some tunes which I chose just for their Offbeat Quotient are just a bit too… out there.
Yet all of this melodramatic angst must be weighed against the inescapable pleasures of finding new artists, whole new songs, which jingle my Christmas bells in delightful ways.
This year, for instance, I happened upon the Canadian songbird Serena Ryder — a name which I’d previously not so much as even read before, although she’s been successful for over ten years. Wikipedia’s opening paragraph about her says, among other things: “An accomplished songwriter and musician, she also possesses a five-octave vocal range and is considered a mezzo-soprano. Her timbre has been described as slightly nasal with a raspy lower register.” That alone would have interested me. But then here she came in 2018 with a whole album of Christmas music, Christmas Kisses ; the style of its cover photo (shown at right) resembles that of a dozen similar albums by less interesting voices and artists in the Christmas-cocktail-music vein. A delightful surprise. Her appearance on this year’s list won’t be the last.
On the quirky eclectic side of the balance sheet, this year I offer you: Los Straitjackets. Like Ryder, they’re far from newcomers, dating back in their case to the 1990s. (For a time, they were a recurring fixture during Christmas season on the old Conan O’Brien late-night talk show.) As for their contribution to this year’s list, “Qué Verdes Son” is nominally merely the Spanish version of “O Tannenbaum/Christmas Tree”; but in Los Straitjackets’ hands it becomes a subtly swinging surf-guitar tune; if it had been recorded in, say, 1963, this performance might have fit comfortably somewhere in my old Melodía Pegadiza series of posts. As with Serena Ryder, I’m confident that this won’t be their only RAMH appearance.
This summer, Amazon announced an upcoming change to the terms of their agreement with paid subscribers to their Music Storage service. Ever since they’d instituted the paid service, you could use it to organize and listen to your entire musical collection (up to 250,000 songs!); you just uploaded the (MP3) music you’d gotten from other sources, whether downloaded from music publishers’ and artists’ sites, ripped from CDs or LPs, whatever. Given the realities, the deal probably couldn’t have lasted — and this, per their announcement, was the cutoff year. Starting in September, the only music I could store on their service was music which I’d purchased from Amazon.
They offered to mitigate the blow a little: if you specifically requested, you’d be allowed to keep on their service any of the music you’d already uploaded as of the deadline. If you didn’t ask, though, they’d delete any “alien” music. You bet I opted in, but I couldn’t help wondering how many long-term users received a genuine shock the next time they tried to use their old familiar playlists… And even for me (and again, probably for many others), this was a nuisance this year. I’d never depended on Amazon 100% when it came time to organize the culled lists, let alone post them here. But it sure helped to have, y’know, everything ultimately in one place — regardless of its source. I’d found both Serena Ryder and Los Straitjackets elsewhere — closer to their own pockets, as it were — but now I had to buy from Amazon to include them in my master list. The artists would still get a cut, of course, just a smaller one: a cut of the cut, so to speak. Argh. Just… argh.
Grinchy practices of the digital-music business aside, I had fun assembling this year’s list, as I do every year. I hope you’re continuing to enjoy it, too — and I hope (as always) the last couple weeks of 2018 prove to be the two weeks you need them to be!**__________________
* “enormous”: now over a thousand songs, which — if played end-to-end — would take two-and-a-half days. That’s a whole lotta elevator music!
** Totally inoffensive cross-cultural seasonal greeting © 2018 by John E. Simpson.
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