Turn It Up: 12 Songs of Christmas Edition

David and Charles with some favorite holiday hits

Merry Christmas to you, from Charles and David here at No Fences Review. Working together on NFR since August has just been extremely good for the both of us, not to mention a lot of fun. Knowing there are folks out there checking in on what we’re thinking about and listening to has been a real gift. Charles’ X-Mas song picks come first below, then David’s. As always, we close this week’s “Turn It Up” with some reading recommendations. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Dwight Yoakam – “Santa Can’t Stay” (from Come On Christmas, 1997)

The sleigh bells might fool for you for a second, but as soon as Yoakam enters with his description of a “cold tear” falling, you know this isn’t going to be any kind of winter wonderland. “Santa Can’t Stay” is somehow both rollicking and harrowing, relaying the story of a broken home for the holidays over the rolling shuffle that Yoakam made his trademark. His high-lonesome vocals are knowing and woeful, falling into the arms of a horn section in the bridge as both refuge and resignation. It’s funny, devastating, and moving all at the same time – just like country music, and, sometimes, just like Christmas. - CH

Darlene Love – “All Alone on Christmas” (from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, 1992)

Of the many reasons why the “Wall of Sound” has proven such an effective – even definitive – atmosphere for Christmas-season hits, perhaps the most obvious is that it captures something about the sparkling, chaotic energies of cold temperatures and big crowds. But a connected reason is that hearing a singer’s voice in the middle of all that bustle offers a perfect musical representation of the search for connection that can make the holidays both beautiful and heartbreaking. This is the trick that’s anchored Christmas classics from Ronnie Spector to Mariah Carey, and Darlene Love is one of its original and most expert practitioners. This 1992 iteration, written by Love acolyte Steve Van Zandt and performed with a Bruce-less E Street Band, finds her at the center of a swirling arrangement that perfectly captures the feeling of being lost in a crowd while everyone else seems to have places to go and (more importantly) people to see. “Nobody oughta be all alone on Christmas,” she argues, and who could disagree with such a powerful singer? Certainly not me. - CH

Paul McCartney – “Wonderful Christmastime” (from McCartney II, 1980)

There are people who hate this song, and I’m not here to argue. Instead, I’m here to say that I love it. Its crystalline synths, fragmented melody, and neighborhood-chorus background voices have a kind of icy warmth that make this a wonderfully welcome ghost of Christmas past. For those of us lucky enough to have fond holiday memories, such nostalgia holds a sweet sadness that McCartney – in all his cornball, bleep-bloop glory – knows is lying just beneath such seeming Yuletide celebrations. The older I get, and the more I’m apart from people with whom I spent those times, hearing Paul sing “We’re here tonight, and that’s enough” is itself enough to stop me short and send me home for Christmas, if only in my dreams. - CH

The Chieftains (feat. Rickie Lee Jones and Suzie Katayama) – “O Holy Night” (from The Bells of Dublin, 1991)

Building from a near-hush, this take on my favorite Christmas hymn lets the magic build and “the mystery be.” From the inestimable Irish group’s beautiful holiday album, this track spotlights Rickie Lee Jones as she wraps the swelling melody with both power and restraint. Around her, the Chieftains and guest cellist Katayama maintain a spare and supportive presence, leaving as much space between the notes as that which they fill with their tender washes of pipes and strings. It’s a graceful lullaby for that baby who started it all, and a soaring testimony for those who wish to bear witness to it. Amen. - CH

Chuck Berry – “Run Rudolph Run” (single, 1958)

Leave it to rock ‘n’ roll’s great chronicler of post-war culture to come up with such an exuberant anthem to work and consumerism. Our guy Rudolph isn’t a bullied outcast here. Instead, he’s leading a team tasked with that most difficult of duties: keeping the boss on task. Santa’s got orders to fill – a “rock ‘n’ roll electric guitar,” of course, as well as a newfangled mechanical doll – and they better take the freeway and fly like Sabre jets and all manner of ‘50s icons deployed by Berry with typical precision and wit. Riding their signature groove, Berry and company keep the operation running smoothly in this portrait of magical Fordism. Jingle bell rock, indeed. - CH

Alison Krauss – “Only You Can Bring Me Cheer (Gentleman’s Lady)” (from A Very Special Acoustic Christmas, 2003)

If you haven’t heard Alison Krauss’ contribution to 2003’s fine A Very Special Acoustic Christmas, I doubt it’ll be what you’re expecting. Or at least it wasn’t what I was expecting, and what a wonderful surprise. Despite Krauss’ reputation, and the album title, this is a full-band R&B blast, with strutting drums, punching horns, and insistent, layered background vocals. Krauss sings with playful horniness, using the piercing clarity of her upper register alongside a deeper, even growly lower range. It could all collapse into soulwoman cosplay – and your mileage may vary, I guess – but I find this joyous track to be a bona fide holiday party. - CH

Brenda Lee — “Christmas Will Be Just Another Lonely Day” (from Merry Christmas from Brenda Lee, 1964)

I’m just so pleased we’re giving the 79-year-old Brenda Lee her poinsettias now, what with her “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree” currently sitting atop the Billboard Hot 100 for a second consecutive week. But after you stream her 1958 Xmas icon again, gift yourself a listen to my personal favorite Lee holiday song, “Christmas Will Be Just Another Lonely Day.” In the song, it’s Christmas Eve and everything is set up perfectly at Brenda’s place for Santa’s arrival—except that her lover’s been gone since summer ended. Drums thunder about her, strings swirl, singers moan—producer Owen Bradley is building a real Wall of Nashville Sound here—while Brenda weeps and wails. Rockin’ sad and solo ‘round the tree.  – DC 

Mike Ireland & Holler — “Christmas Past” (from Learning How to Live, 1998)

From one of the best country albums of the last quarter century comes one of the best Christmas songs of the last quarter century. “Christmas Past,” the song, is a wonder of post-divorce holiday misery--melancholy remembrances of Christmases long gone, tell-tale details (“The ornaments you let me keep weren’t enough to fill a tree”), and a miserably beautiful melody. The record’s even better, with Ireland’s haunted singing framed by fragile glockenspiel and with Jerry Yester’s-string arrangement evoking icy-cold comfort. Come Christmas morning, Ireland groans, dreading the dawn, he’ll be all alone with just the one gift: his memories. – DC

Merle Haggard — “White Christmas” (from The Nashville Christmas Album, 1986)

Christmas-and-Crosby fan Merle Haggard cut “White Christmas” three times in his career. I like the decorated-with-strings-and-a-choir version from 1973’s Merle Haggard’s Christmas Present almost as much as I like the twinkling-and-reverent take on Hag’s 2004’s I Wish I Was Santa Claus. Hands down my favorite, though, is the gently jazzy “White Christmas” he cut, 1986, especially for a various artists comp called The Nashville Christmas Album. Accompanied only by Stranger guitarist Clint Strong, playing in a fashion that sort of splits the difference between Chet Atkins and Django Reinhardt. Just lovely, and with Haggard longing for snow at the height of his powers. The Nashville Christmas Album is long out of print, but you can find Merle’s very best “White Christmas” included as a bonus cut on more recently reissued editions of yet another Merle holiday album, Goin’ Home for Christmas, originally out in 1982. – DC

Bobby Timmons — “Deck the Halls” (from Holiday Soul, 1965)

If you’re craving a groovy new jazz trio album this Christmas while also looking maybe to give Vince Guraldi a break, I highly recommend you give Bobby Timmons a stream or three. With drummer Walter Perkins and bassist Butch Warren, piano man Timmons (a former Jazz Messenger and a composer best known for “Moanin’”) leads his combo on its delightfully funky way through the decidedly un-funky “Deck the Halls.” This is spare soul jazz at its best-- regardless of the season. You know the forumla going in—play the melody, improvise a long solo around the changes, back to the head. But that just highlights Timmons’ distinctively soulful style. Listen to this album-opening “Deck the Halls,” and I’m betting you’ll spin the whole set. Best already to have a cocktail poured when you hit play. – DC

Nat King Cole — “Mrs. Santa Claus” (from The Magic of Christmas with Children, 1966)

The Christmas album I most associate with my childhood is a 1966 Nat King Cole set called, appropriately enough, The Magic of Christmas with Children (not to be mistaken for 1960’s The Magic of Christmas, a different Nat King Cole album that includes zero of the tracks I’m about to mention). The album we had was released on Capitol’s cheapo “Creative Products” label which explains why we bought it at the Safeway and why three of its dozen tracks feature a magic-less, and entirely King Cole-less, children’s choir. But it was the rest of the album that jumpstarted my lifelong love affair with King Cole’s beautifully rusty croon, an inviting, cozy instrument that sounds like chestnuts roasting on an open fire even when he’s not singing about them. Inevitably, The Magic of Christmas with Children includes “The Christmas Song” (a rerecording, I later learned). For me, though, the album’s real draws were its several fun holiday obscurities (“Little Christmas Tree,” “The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot,” “Buon Natale” and “The Happiest Christmas Tree”) that nearly sixty years on I can still sing by heart even though I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone but me or Nat sing them. Ditto for “Mrs. Santa Claus,” which is all about what Santa’s wife does to keep the operation running. Then as now it’s my favorite on the album, but I must say it lands differently for me these days. When I was a kid, I pictured the title character as looking exactly like her namesake in Rankin & Bass’ Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and I loved the song just because it was ridiculously catchy, was at once spazzed-out loose and music-box rigid—and because it was almost impossible not to sing along with.  Today, I mainly notice that, while Santa gets all the acclaim, it’s his wife who sees to it that everything gets done at the North Pole. In just three brief verses and barely two minutes, she tends to livestock, takes gift orders and fills them, wraps them, and loads them for shipment—all while doing the laundry, the ironing and the cooking. Merry grown-up-gendered Christmas, Mrs. Claus! (Since 1990, The Magic of Christmas with Children has been available by the title Cole, Christmas & Kids.) – DC

Ingrid Andress — “Christmas Always Finds Me” (single, 2023)

It’s always nice to discover that one of your favorites songwriters has a Christmas-song gear. Andress’ new “Only Once a Year” is a fetching Christmas reminder, but it’s streaming B-side, “Christmas Always Finds Me,” is the one that’s found my heart. For those who celebrate, it nails the way that no matter where or how old you are, and even during those years when maybe you’re just not feeling it, that something will click, or maybe jingle, to remind you of the season’s hope and of the many losses it helps us mourn and cherish. For me, this year, it was Andress’ melancholy tune that found me. – DC  

Reading recommendations:

-David Cantwell on “Ten Great Classic Country Christmas Albums,” for Rolling Stone

-Justin A. Davis on Childish Gambino, for Paste

-Emily Auerbach talks to Craig Werner about Dave Marsh, for Wisconsin Public Radio

-Annie Zaleski talks with Brenda Lee about the perennial popularity of “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree,” for Salon

Plus, here later this week… NFR interviews Annie Zaleski about her new book, This Is Christmas, Song by Song

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