As I sort through my holiday music library to find things to listen to this season I figured I'd share my brief thoughts on what I've been sampling. All opinions are of a grumpy old man and yours may vary.
Geoff Love - Noel
When I was a little kid my dad frequently had me tag along to his work and in one of the departments where he’d send me too “help out” the radio was essentially superglued in place to WPAT, the local Beautiful Music station. And I Hated It. I didn’t want to hear watered-down Muzak versions of pop hits and “old peoples music”, so it was a mild form of torture for me to be there.
Unless it was Christmas.
I loved the easy listening Christmas music, I’d turn my own family radios into little holiday elevators, there was just something so cozy about it, the perfect background sound for the holidays. I couldn’t relate to dentist office lite hits 11 months out the tear but come yuletide I was all in.
Released in 1974, this album probably played in heavy rotation on WPAT during those formative years. It’s a sold middle of the road easy listening disc. Not a slapdash, recorded in an hour with a bunch of hungover semi-pros, hack job but nothing interesting enough that it serves as anything more than pleasant background noise.
Medium Rotation
The Abbey Choir - Christmas Classics
Nice old school choral collection. Released in 1993 but it wouldn’t surprise me if the recordings were older. Archived (due to overabundance of this sort of thing in my collection)
Alex Usher - Harps of Gold
Christmas favorites played on autoharp(s)
What’s an autoharp you may ask. Well back in the 30s and ’40s, before car radios were a standard feature, carmakers would build in small musical instruments in the glove compartment, floor, and seatbacks, and one of the most popular at the time was the Auto-harp, a small harp that descended from the drivers and/or passenger seatbacks allowing the angelic strains of the harp to accompany families as they, perhaps, took a Sunday drive in the country.
Actually, that’s not true at all. Just a popular misconception. The autoharp was actually a spin-off of the player piano Users could purchase harp arrangements of popular songs on cards, or purchase blank cards to create their own arrangements, and, using a mechanism inspired by music boxes, play the song on their special Auto-Harp. Cards could even be stacked to allow for long-playing harp sessions. It was in fact a smaller portable version of this device that drivers would have installed in their cars to listen to as they, perhaps, took a Sunday drive in the country.
Either way, a little autoharp goes a long long way and this is a lot of autoharp. Archived
Alan Horsey - Switched on Christmas
Though the title may put you in mind of Wendy Carlo’s innovative Moog work on albums such as Switched on Bach, this collection is more of a Hooked on Christmas rip off. Sorry but adding a disco drum machine beat to bog-standard organ renditions of holiday songs won’t flick anyone's switch. Not cheesy enough to fun, even ironically, just useless. Archived (nearly deleted)
Not to be confused by the superior 1971 album of the same name.
Sarah Dawn Finer - Winterland
After ten years this is still in pretty heavy rotation around here. Her version of Winter Song is one of my faves, but the whole album is terrific. Heavy Rotation.
Sung Si Kyung - Winter Wonderland
Solid set of crooned big band holiday standards. Doesn’t do anything wrong but there’s not much here to displace dozens of other similar albums in my library. Good but probably a skip.
