[Kylie Minogue seems to have established almost a mini-career our of camping it up while singing “Santa Baby”; I must have found dozens of videos — “official” and otherwise — of her performing it at one venue or another. This is my favorite, shot at a concert for troops serving with the International Force East Timor (INTERFET) in 1999. It’s just soooo cheesily reminiscent of some of the musical acts (Joey Heatherton, Jayne Mansfield, etc.) which I remember from televised Bob Hope Christmas specials in the 1960s. And yeah, I know: it’s definitely not in sync with current standards of enlightened, socially conscious professional performances. Maybe the winking humor of it all is actually an oblique acknowledgment that Yes, yes, we know this is over the top… but it’s for the boys, so it’s okay! I’ll probably regret posting it here within five minutes of hitting the Publish button.]
Greetings — and welcome once again to the annual Running After My Hat Christmas-music “extravaganza”! This year, I’m finally getting back to adding new songs to the annual list (hooray!)… with some differences (hmm…?!?).
First, and most obviously, I’m switching this year to an embedded Spotify playlist; feel free to listen to it while I continue to rattle on about peripheral matters (and feel free to disregard the peripheral matters). Below, you’ll find this year’s list (external link to Spotify, in case you want to listen to it outside RAMH) — and for you oldtimers, please don’t be alarmed (as I kinda am!) by the obvious differences in presentation and interface:
…and here’s the complete list going back to 2008, now containing 140 songs — including this year’s additions and replacements — for over seven hours of background music (external link to Spotify):
Now, about those differences (with apologies for the obsessively fussy tech talk)…
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 |
2018 | 2019 |
2020 | 2021 |
2022 |
- I really wanted to get away from having to upload new songs to the Running After My Hat server every year. I don’t mind doing that, as such, but it has become such a pain to offer the playlist here as I’ve done it in prior years; it requires fairly extensive and definitely error-prone editing of raw HTML code. With a Spotify playlist, I basically just drop the link to Spotify and it all just works, somehow.
- But using Spotify comes with some downsides, too:
- The streaming service needs a license from the music’s rights holder to stream tracks. Inevitably, some tracks I’d always felt free to include before — because they were all from my own music collection of CDs and MP3s — have simply never been licensed by Spotify, for one reason or another. So the Spotify playlist has invisible gaps where those songs were. (You won’t hear the gaps; I’ve tried to substitute tracks to sorta-kinda recreate the “feel” of the missing items.)
- Annoyingly, I do not think you’ll be able to shuffle the order in which songs are played. (I can do it myself when I listen to it outside of RAMH, but apparently that option is not currently available for embedded playlists like the two shown above.) If you want the shuffle option, you’ll have to go to the last Christmas-music playlist I added music to — that would’ve been the 2020 edition — and click the little “Popout” button on the audio player. Just understand, again, that for now any further songs I add each year will never be added to the old player. (Still: 130 songs! seven hours of playing time!)
Enough of that for now.
…except to let you know that you can see the complete list of all tracks in the playlist, through this year (and including the ones missing from the Spotify version), by clicking here.
This year’s playlist includes a clutch of favorite artists from previous lists — Perry Como, Loreena McKennitt, Elvis, Anonymous 4 — but also a mix of new names (some of them you’ll probably never see again) and names I was surprised never to have seen in prior years, given the Christmas music which The Missus and I have accumulated for ourselves: the Carpenters; José Feliciano; Porter Music Box Company. And how could I not have included Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—?
Oh. Wait. Right. I actually did include it — in fact, it sat there right at the outset: December, 2008: a YouTube clip of the scene in Meet Me in St. Louis in which her character Esther sings it to her little sister “Tootie.”
(If you actually visit that post now, by the way, you’ll see that it’s broken in a variety of ugly ways (although I did repair the broken video link). Victim — like many of us — of technology evolving beyond our reach!)
One artist’s name I truly did not recognize: the Roddy Doyle Trio. As far as I can tell, this is not the Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle who’s written many novels for adults and children. (I thought it might be that RD, because I know he’s interested in and has written about music. But I’ve found no indication that he plays in a trio by that name. As for the trio, I’ve found no discography which names their personnel. A mystery for now!)
Enjoy the music — don’t worry about listening to it here; just bookmark the Spotify links, put it on in the background, and get on with your holiday. And enjoy the rest of 2023, with my thanks for visiting!
Marta Pelrine-Bacon says
I’m not gonna lie. I do love Kylie. Thanks for the music list! I hope I can listen to it. Dad plays his country music almost nonstop (if we’re not watching one of his shows on TV). And while it wouldn’t bother him, it would drive me to distraction if I can hear his music in the background while I try to listen to something else. But eventually I will listen!
John says
When The Missus is watching something on TV while I’m trying to focus on what’s on the laptop, I often open up Spotify or whatever and listen to it via the Bluetooth connection to my hearing aids. Granted, not everyone has that option, but I bet Bluetooth earbuds (is that what they’re called?) work the same way. A possible treat for him, like, “Dad, this way you can listen to your music 24×7!” (laughing) [Not really serious — I know it wouldn’t be safe to isolate him from surrounding sounds.]
I know almost nothing about Kylie Minogue. When I first saw that video (on the National Archives site, of all places), the text described her as “actress-singer Kylie Minogue” and I thought, Huh? OTOH, this is her second appearance in one of these Christmas posts. Maybe I oughta tune in more!
Froog says
Lovely to have it back again – seems like an emblem of finally restored ‘normality’, whatever that may be.
I wasn’t expecting it to drop so early – have been too preoccupied with ‘stuff’ to check in for the past week or two…. A nice surprise to find these goodies here waiting for me just as I get around to acknowledging that it’s almost Christmas.
I hope you and the Missus are happily settled into your new home now, and looking forward to a splendid 2024.
John says
…and lovely to see you back again, too!
A preoccupation with “stuff,” I think, tends to go hand-in-hand with December. Please tell me that your stuff has been mostly of the good sort! Are you yourself still wandering the globe, or have you finally reached the blessed state of “Right HERE is good enough”???
Froog says
I am currently living in one of the most beautiful towns on earth – but, of course, I’m never satisfied; the nomad shoes won’t let me be. It doesn’t help that, while trying last year to disentagle myself from my previous ‘home’ (in Batambang, Cambodia), I developed a silly crush on an American woman I met there, and so am now shuttling back and forth from there to here.
The ‘stuff’ was mainly coping with the anxiety of needing to renew a passport while overseas. The UK Goverment’s website isn’t the most helpfully laid out, so it took me quite a while even to figure out what I needed to do. And then I was in agonies about how long it might take (many horror stories online of it often needing three months, or even longer if something somehow went amiss with the process). As it turned out, there is no backlog at the moment, and my new book was issued within 48 hours of the payment being processed – although it did then take another 8 days for it to reach me out here.
One of my old Beijing buddies is getting married in Vietnam in a couple of months, so there’s a big reunion of most of my old crew in prospect there. I’m treating myself to a month in Hoi An prior to that, heading back to Cambodia afterwards; so, probably going to be ‘on the road’ for 3 or 4 months from the middle of February.
John says
I’m almost certainly past the age of crushes of any kind, but respect their power enough never that I’d never call one silly! I’ll count on eventually hearing of a happy outcome from yours, one way or the other!
Photos of Hoi An convince me that it looks spectacular. Seems like an excellent wedding venue and the ideal time of year for an event there, too. And of course, I know of your raconteurial talents and predispositions, so there will probably be some excellent stories coming from that experience…