Holiday Grab Bag
Auld Lang Syne 2020 (Tom Stromsodt and Neil Fasen)
I felt it was important to cap the year with one last Neil collaboration and what better way to do it than using the girls new ukulele to usher out this dumpster fire of a year?
-Tom Stromsodt
Knowing that I needed a jump start on music making, Tom graciously lobbed up a soft ball to me and let me add some backing vocals, bass, and accordion to his rendition of the timeless New Year’s Eve classic, “Auld Lang Syne.” I’m just slowing getting my new recording cave operational and this gave me the chance to use it for something. Thanks, Tom!
-Neil Fasen
Christmas is Love, James Brown Cover (Jeff Kearns’s holiday song)
I've been weirdly under the pool tarp these days. Pushing the threshold of my ribbon mic. This song helped me out in the mid 90's when I was selling thick sweaters from a kiosk in a mall. Fun to try to inhabit. Kinda off like a blue Flintstone.
-Jeff Kearns
Carol of the Bells: 2020 Death March Edition (Randy Dever’s holiday song)
Heh. Kind of a bleak take on this Holiday Fave.
I’ll forgo the usual technical spiel, but I will say the Korg Poly-61 synthesizer absolutely rips. Mine is acting up and all notes are playing about a step and a half out of tune. I wanted to play it in a specific key, so I tuned all the other instruments to it. Pulled out some of my favorite sample material on this.
-Devetron
Snow is Falling in Manhattan by Purple Mountains (Czahr’s Cover)
David Berman and the Silver Jews first came to my attention way back in the 90's when I had just gotten into Pavement and heard that Pavement was involved with the Silver Jews. Silver Jews were of course no Pavement, but then Stephen Malkmus was no David Berman. Both were great songwriters in their own ways. David Berman was particularly great with words. I was excited for his Purple Mountains release last year because another one of my favorite bands, Woods, served as producers. It's a great album, but sadly David didn't get to see much of the appreciation for it because he chose to end his life.
When I was searching for a Holiday song to cover, I kept hitting roadblocks. I just can't do one of the classics because I can barely even handle hearing even the best versions of the classics anymore. As I was revisiting Purple Mountains the other day, this song came up and I knew instantly it would be the one. It sounds and feels like winter to me. It's not explicitly a "Holiday" song, but neither are many of what we typically consider Christmas songs (JIngle Bells is King of the Christmas songs and mentions neither Christmas nor holidays of any kind, just snow.)
I also wanted to pay tribute to Berman, and there is a line in this song that he seemed to have written for that specific purpose: "Songs build little rooms in time, and housed within the song's design is the ghost the host has left behind to greet and sweep the guest inside, stoke the fire and sing his lines."
I'm proud to stoke the fire he built and be a guest in the house of his song.
As for the technicalities of my cover, the guitar work is not my best. I've been struggling with a severely pinched nerve in my left elbow for the last few months and I've only recently been able to actually play a guitar again without extreme pain and my hand going completely numb. It still goes numb if I play more than ten minutes so I didn't do more than a couple of takes, and this take had the least amount of bad stuff in it. Beyond that, I didn't do anything interesting. It's just several layers of an acoustic guitar with multiple GarageBand effects and my voice.
Enjoy, have a most excellent holday and lets get the fuck out of 2020.
-Eric “Czahr” Scott
7 O'Clock News/Silent Night (Noah's Cover)
This song terrified me as a child, and I haven't thought much about it until I ran across Fiona Apple and Phoebe Bridgers' interesting 2019 cover, (which is a dark and surly dirge of angst). It made me unearth Simon and Garfunkel's gem and this is one of my favorite sad Christmas songs. I try to pay homage to both versions: a nod to Apple's version in style and a nod to Simon and Garfunkel's version by including the death of Grumpy Cat to mirror their report of the death of Lenny Bruce. Fun fact: Simon and Garfunkel got Lenny Bruce's age wrong in their song, and Grumpy cat actually died in 2019 (in case you happen to need this info for your next bar trivia match).
There are so many earnestly trite covers of this on youtube and I didn't think a 2020 version of this song could follow the same stylistic rules as the original.
My angle in was this: I secretly love a good local news "kicker". It's a network's attempt to lighten the program and make their ultra attractive newsreaders somewhat relatable, (I never tire of seeing them try their hand at stilted ad-libs at the end). Editing this was a nightmare, as well as trying to sing harmony (Simon and Garfunkel make it seem so easy). I now have a loop of the contrived "sing-songy" tones every reporter uses to journey their way through the beats a local news tale. Hopefully this won't cause too much ear-bleed! Happy Holidays!
-Noah Warren