“I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I. Don’t want a lot for Christmas.” *struggles to change the radio dial amid gridlocked holiday traffic* “There’s just one thing I need” *hurry up with my damn latte! I think I’m going to die. Why the hell is Starbucksplaying Christmas music in mid-October?* “I don’t care about the presents” *internal Elaine monologue ‘I think I’m going to die in this department store. Ma’am, why must you spray the perfume so close to my face. I can’t breathe! What if the earth begins to shake and we’re stuck in here forever underneath mannequins and holiday shoppers and that damn Mariah Careysong stuck on repeat?’* “Underneath the Christmas tree” “No” *raising a strict finger to students who should be studying in the back* “Not before Thanksgiving.” “I just want you for my own/ More than you could ever know.” Every year, Christmas music gets earlier and earlier. “Make my dreams come true.” Corporate America wants to put us in credit card debt. “All I want for Christmas” Call me Scrooge, but I’d like to go back to childhood when Christmases were magical. “Is” If only we could go back in time to say, 199~ “You~~~~~~~~~” That’s it! 1992! before this song ruled the world.
Meme from three years ago.
I DON’T NEED TO HANG MY STOCKING. Am I being too harsh on the holiday classic? Critics loved the song when it came out. If I were writing a blog in 1994, maybe I would have appreciated the musical elements–the throwback to old Christmas songs, the unique chords, the imitation of a wind-up Christmas music box–but in 2021, I’m too desensitized to whatever musical point Carey was trying to make. To me, Christmas music, the more traditional the better. There is something so much more magical about a small church singing on a snowy evening hymn from the 1800s than Bing Crosby singing in the ’40s. When I was growing up, several CCM Christmas albums captured an old-time Christmas–whether it was Michael W. Smith‘s Christmastimeor the artists who sang on the City on a Hill Christmas project. There was something about the 20th-century Christmas songs that just sounded like shopping. And they were done to death–disco, punk, soul, pick a genre. My old soul, though, has to cope with a commercialized holiday, and at the center of the commercialized holiday rests “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the retail worker’s nightmare adapted into a song.
ALL THE LIGHTS ARE SHINING EVERYWHERE. It’s been a hard year and the holidays barely made an impact on me. Time moved so quickly that it felt like it was just yesterday that I was sweating in August heat and today it’s Christmas Eve. The school year was also a blur. Being short-staffed kept my coworkers and me constantly planning, teaching, grading, writing comments, and completing administrative tasks. Weekends were busy as I had taken on a little extra work and I spent the time with my partner who was completing his senior year of medical school. My personal time was split between blogging and following a fitness plan. And I also got sick more times this year since I stopped wearing a mask at the beginning of the year. I finally caught COVID in August, and I’m getting over my third cold (or maybe sinus infection) of the year. I also spent a lot of time (and money) preparing for a vacation this coming January to London. Now the semester has ended and I have free time. I furiously bought presents, and half-heartedly set up my Charlie Brown tree. Around November I started listening to Christmas music, but not exclusively, mostly on Spotify. Somehow the spirit of Christmas hasn’t settled in yet. I’ve been blogging about Christmas songs since the first week of December, but the season’s magic feels to have worn off on my mid-thirties heart. So, today, I’m posting the original Mariah Carey version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” because I’m not sick of it yet. I feel like I didn’t have a chance to get sick of it. I lived under my headphones this year while working in the office. I didn’t play Christmas music in class until the last days and I mostly controlled the music. Maybe, if the years go like this again, I can preserve the magic of the song. But I certainly don’t want to feel this rushed again. If years continue like this, I’m going to wake up and be old sooner than I think.
Here’s my ongoing playlist of songs featured in Korean dramas or movies. Many songs are originals, and some by non-Korean artists have key plot points in Korean dramas.
In 1944 or 1945, Mel Tormé and Robert Wells wrote the song “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” Tormé talks about writing the song on a hot summer’s day as a list of cold weather fantasies he and Wells, his songwriting partner, brainstormed to think cool thoughts. The Nat King Cole Trio first recorded the song in June 1946, under “The Christmas Song” (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire). The group re-recorded the song in August, which became a hit on pop and R&B radio. Nat “King” Cole, as a solo artist, would record the song two more times throughout his career. Cole’s 1961 version, his fourth and final, is the version most played on radio and streamed today. That version is also in the Library of Congress to be preserved by the United States National Recording Registry.
SO, I’M OFFERING THIS SIMPLE PHRASE. On a 2021 holiday episode of Hit Parade, host Chris Molaphany talks about the phenomenon of classic hit-makers becoming reduced to their holiday legacies in what he nicknames “Chestnut Roasters.” Looking broadly from the times of Nat King Cole and Dean Martin to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll with Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” to The Waitresses’ 1981 hit to Michael Bublé’s discography, Molaphany looks at radio and streaming data, comparing the holiday tracks to the artist’s non-holiday hits. Cole was a prolific artist in his short 45-year life with multiple hits– “Nature Boy,” “Orange Colored Sky,” “L-O-V-E”–yet “The Christmas Song” is the best-remembered song from the artist. It’s a kind of defacto one-hit wonder in the public consciousness because the public that remembers has mostly died. But that’s not the case for Michael Bublé, nor Relient K, whose Christmas catalog dominates their Spotify play count until long after the holidays. Even Mariah Carey, who has 19 Billboard Hot 100 number 1 hits over four decades, is celebrating her status as a one-hit wonder.
TO KIDS FROM ONE TO NINETY-TWO. The disappearance of Nat King Cole and older artists’ legacies has been bothering me as I think about musical heritage. I studied jazz guitar briefly, learning some of the standards from the ‘30s to ‘40s, but even almost 20 years ago those songs were just known by the wealthy elderly as instrumentals. It makes me wonder how much of the music I love will be just a product of my time and future generations won’t care about it. Music has been recorded, books have been published, and now everything is on the Internet, a search term away–and yet who’s going to care about that article in which Paris Hilton carries a Versace bag rather than a Prada? It’s just bits of data. Will that be all P.O.D., Anberlin, or The Fray? Kansas, a group with a reliance of 9 million monthly listeners, said “All we are is dust in the wind,” but it seems that we’re all bits of data a solar flare away from a memory wipe. Okay, that’s maybe too pessimistic. I’ll stop. After all, in 2023 Christmas is still relevant, despite the imaginary “War on Christmas.” And as long as Christmas is relevant, the one song that gets to call itself “The Christmas Song” sung by the man who popularized the tune will be remembered, even if you prefer a lasagna to a turkey.
Thirty Seconds to Mars’ third album, This Is War,is about overcoming conflict. The band had been “at war” with their record label, EMI, claiming that the contract they signed was not binding in their home state of California due to the contract’s duration. The band eventually made a documentary titledArtifactabout the lawsuit and took aim at the exploitative role of labels, allowing fans, not just of the band but all artists, to see the seedy side of the music business. Before releasing Artifact, the lawsuit was settled, and Thirty Seconds to Mars signed a new deal with EMI, renegotiating their terms. Both parties were able to come to favorable terms to create a contract that worked better in the changing music business of the coming decade of the 2010s.
FATHER HAS SPOKEN. For an album about conflict in the music industry, This Is War is a very hopeful album. This is probably due to the production by two legendary rock producers. Mark Ellis, known in the studio as Flood, became famous for his productions in the ‘80s synth-pop and British rock acts such as New Order, Depeche Mode, and a-ha before becoming instrumental in the records of Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, and White Lies, to name a few. The other producer, Steve Lillywhite, was also instrumental in producing some of the biggest acts in the ‘80s from Peter Gabriel to The Talking Heads. He continued to produce in the ‘90s and ‘00s for bands like The La’s, The Dave Matthews Band, Switchfoot, Jason Mraz, and The Killers. Flood and Lillywhite represent two styles that were popularized in the ‘80s, and both producers worked with a band that perhaps embodied the ‘80s and ‘90s pop-rock, U2. Lillywhite produced U2’s first three albums and continued to work with the band in the ‘90s. Flood first worked with U2 on their biggest album, The Joshua Tree. In fact, along with Brian Eno, Lillywhite and Flood helped to shape U2’s anthemic and sometimes experimental sound into the stadium rock band they still are today. For second generation post-punk bands like The Killers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, alternating between Lillywhite and Flood’s production seems like a great way to replicate rock’s arguably most accessible and commercially viable moments. Thirty Seconds to Mars’ departure from experimental dark rock on their first two albums to the anthemic boosted them into critical and commercially success.
THE AGE OF MAN IS OVER. Steve Lillywhite and Flood’s productionalong with anthemic bands such asU2 and The Killers bring out a certainspiritual sound in rock music. It feels like this was what Thirty Seconds to Mars’ This Is War tries to capture. Many of the songs feature recordings of fans singing. The band hosted events called “The Summit,” which gathered around 1,000 fans to record lines from This Is War. The communal nature of the album and its recording process sound spiritual, like U2 or the Christian worship bands inspired by U2. But Thirty Seconds to Mars is not a Christian band, nor is its lyricist and frontman Jared Leto religious, other than starting a parody cult in 2013. In the song “100 Suns,” Leto states: “I believe in nothing, not in sin and not in God.” In some ways, the song serves as a key to the album’s interpretation as he goes on to state: “I believe in nothing but the truth of who we are.” The album’s first single “Kings and Queens” tells an origin story of human beings. Rather than an Adam and Eve story, the speaker declares: “We are the kings and the queens of promise . . . Maybe children of a lesser God between heaven and hell.” The powerful song is about the human spirit and the inalienable worth that each person holds as he or she is only “the victims of ourselves.” Despite the dark times that the band endured in creating the album, hope permeates the music and lyrics. It feels almost alien to the dark times we’ve been facing in the past decade with the rise of autocrats, recessions, plague, and the undeniability of climate change manifesting more rapidly every year. Hope seems to have evaporated, particularly for the non-religious. Maybe a rock album from 2009 can remind us that we’re stronger together.
Tooth & Nail Records had a partnership with Christian bookstores for many years, and most of the label’s signed bands appeared on the shelves of a Christian bookstore with an Alternative or Hard Rock section. Even if a band was sold in a Christian bookstore didn’t guarantee that the band or members of the band were even Christians or if they were Christians that they aligned with the conservative values that the store represented. From time to time, this caused tension between artists and the stores with some of the albums being pulled from shelves due to questionable lyrics or album art or statements from the band. Sometimes, bands asked not to be distributed through the Christian bookstores, which became financial viable when EMI bought 50% of the label in 2002. However, in the late 2010s the two biggest Christian retailers, Family Christian Bookstore and Lifeway Christian Bookstore closed their brick-and-mortar stores, transitioning to online platforms. The age of finding new music in the Christian bookstore was officially over
FREE MY SOUL. In 2013, Tooth & Nail CEO Brandon Ebel sold the label’s catalog to Capitol Christian Music Group to buy back the 50% of the label, making it completely independent again. The changes in music consumption changed the Christian Rock industry. Tooth & Nail Records two imprint labels, the heavy record label Solid State and the Contemporary Christian label BEC, fared the changes in the industry with devoted listeners. Most of the financially viable Tooth & Nail acts from the ‘00s signed to other labels, went independent, or broke up, and Tooth & Nail of the post-EMI relationship became a home to many new artists. Some of these new artists were marketed to the shrinking Christian Rock market; however, many weren’t marketed to the Christian market. The problem was there was no market for these bands. Even the Christian artists drummed up controversy for using profanity in their lyrics. The f-bomb in worship band King’s Kaleidoscope’s “A Prayer” was a turning point in the mostly clean-cut bands that the label had branded itself on for twenty years.
YOU SAID YOU WANT MORE, AND NOW I’M BREAKING MY JAW. In 2021, Tooth & Nail Records released albums by Valleyheart and Salt Creek. Both releases carried songs with explicit labels and neither were marketed to Christian Rock radio. Matt Carter interviewed the lead singer of Valleyheart and guitarist Nathan Richardson of Salt Creek on the Labeled Podcast. Richardson got his start in music as a music promoter when he was a teenager. In the interview, Richardson talked about his love of indie music he discovered on MySpace, which ultimately got him interested in the bands signed to Tooth & Nail Records. He talks about getting bands to perform in his town of Lexington, Nebraska, on their way through either east or west. Previous iterations of Salt Creek often performed as opening acts for these bands, and eventually Salt Creek recorded two independent EPs starting with 2017’s Where Strangers Go. In May 2021, the band released a single EP Our Own World, introducing Tooth & Nail listeners to their band before their October 15th release of Out of the Sky. The grunge-inspired midwestern hard rock is sounds both inspired by Tooth & Nail and mainstream radio or the ‘00s. Neither of the band’s Tooth & Nail releases are particularly unique. The story of the band is more about breaking out of the small mid-western music scene than offering something new to Tooth & Nail or rock music. Today’s song, “Lock the Doors” is well produced, and the gloomy guitars create a mood. But there are tons of post-grunge songs from the ‘00s that create that very mood. We haven’t heard anything from the band since Out of the Sky. It wouldn’t surprise me if that will be the last we hear of Salt Creek, at least in its current form. But they could return with better songs if they’re given the chance.
Pinkertonis a foundational album in the emo genre. Weezer’s second record was a commercial failure at the time of its release, especially following their massive debut record. Many successful bands look back at the album almost as a kind of bible of guitar tones and lyrical content. Pinkerton produced three singles, including “Pink Triangle,” a song in which the speaker, a boy in college, falls for a lesbian who doesn’t return his affection. The song explores the complexities surrounding sexual identity, which seems progressive for the time but a little cringy today. And it’s that cringe that seeps into Watashi Wa’s 2022 People Like People, an album I’ve talked about before, but today I wanted to look into why a self-identifying “ministry band” quoted Weezer to “say it ‘Like You Mean It.’”
SO HERE COMES THE SON TO REMIND YOU OF YOUR OWN BELIEFS. Watashi Wa started as a punk band when Seth Roberts and the original band were in middle school. Inspired heavily by early Tooth & Nail bands such as MxPx and Ghoti Hook in a time when Tooth & Nail Records started moving away from the fast drums and three-chorded fast songs, Watashi Wa signed to Bettie Rocket Records, where many former Tooth & Nail punk bands and former members of those bands formed new bands. Also on Bettie Rocket was another band, Freeto Boat, who is featured in today’s song, “Like You Mean It.” Freeto Boat was a Christian ska/punk band, starting as a ten-piece band with ahorn section, eventually moving into a hardcore direction. The band broke up in 2000 but started making music in 2019, around the time when Watashi Wa reformed. Like many of the features on People Like People, only avid fans of the often obscure bands would know the contributions made to the songs.
YOUR MIND AND PRIDE. People Like People was my #2 best album of 2022, but it certainly wasn’t without issue—some of which I have talked about in the two other posts about it. Today’s song, “Like You Mean It,” takes a lighthearted look at polarization. Like a lot of the record, the lyrics are confusing. What exactly is Seth Roberts trying to say? What stance is he trying to take? The message Roberts comes back to is a lament about how unfortunate it is that people are divided on issues. He talks about how quickly love can turn to hate, possibly referencing cancel culture. In 2023, spending time in America gave me a generous view of Roberts’ views expressed in the album. But almost two years later, I feel like that even though there is more of an openness to LGB rights—transgender rights are still abysmal—a causal reference to a Weezer song that casually references the demarcation of a group of people Hitler tried to eradicate feels trite when the world is looking more and more dystopian. Today’s song led me down a rabbit hole which led to me getting 1/3 of the way through Ken Setterington’s history, Branded by the Pink Triangle, which tells stories about gay men who were imprisoned, tortured, and killed for their sexual orientation. Setterington points out that lesbians were not systematically targeted as were gay men, and if they were imprisoned, they wore a black triangle to symbolize that they were socially deviant. The book doesn’t bring this up to belittle the suffering of one marginalized group but to show a history of how Berlin transformed from one of the most progressive cities to being part of one of the most oppressive regimes. How quickly liberal thought of the scientists, academics, and philosophers was silenced and then eliminated by the Nazi party, all in the name of making Germany great again. Fast forward to the 80s and 90s on college campuses, the triangle became a pride symbol in the Weezer song. Rivers Cuomo laments falling in love with a girl who cannot love him back because of her sexual orientation. “Pink Triangle” is maybe a little problematic because of the speaker reducing his love interest to a sexual orientation. But the speaker’s pain feels genuine. Watashi Wa’s “Like You Mean It” feels trite, like the person who announces loudly at a homogeneous social gathering: “I’m not homophobic. I listen to Weezer’s “‘Pink Triangle.’” It’s the same person who says that homosexuality is a recent human development or that the Holocaust could never happen again today because we read about it in history class once. I realize I’m on a bit of a rant, but I decided to take Watashi Wa’s advice and say it like I mean it. I’m getting really tired of conservative gaslighting. Hands up!
In August, Anberlin announced that they had “slowly entered the Vegaera,” in the song “Seven,” one of the two new tracks on the band’s eighth studio album. Vega functioned more as a compilation of two EPs released in the two prior years. On October 18, though, a celebration for Anberlin’s new album seemed to be finished as the band released the post-album single “High Stakes.” Like “Walk Alone” and “Seven,” “High Stakes” featured vocals from Matty Mullins rather than Stephen Christian. Mullins took to social media, explaining the background to Anberlin’s latest single, saying that he was listening to old files for songs that were never recorded. Mullins explains that he came to the band as a fan more than a professional singer and colleague, despite his band Memphis May Fire’s success outside of Anberlin’s clear pop-punk influence. With the three Mullins tracks in Anberlin’s canon, it’s time to start to prepare ourselves for the possibility that Stephen Christian may not return and that Mullins may not only be the band’s vocalist but lyricist.
NEVER BEEN THE ONE TO FOLD AND GIVE UP A GAME. “High Stakes” feels like a lost song from Lost Songs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the riff originated between Never Take Friendship Personalor Cities. Besides Matty Mullins’ vocals, the song doesn’t sound particularly tied to one era of Anberlin. It’s a solid B-side in the band’s catalog, but it’s not all that special. Unlike the band’s recent releases, the song doesn’t push the band sonically—heavier, electronically, poppier. It’s business as usual for Joseph Milligan on the guitar. No special lead guitar parts. The lyrics are a clever use of card game clichés, almost delivered in classic Relient K fashion. Delivered with seemingly half-hearted anger, the “house of cards” the lyrics attempt to build fails to lay flat on the rickety card table of substance. Stephen Christian’s lyrics also have fallen flat like “High Stakes” at times. But classic Anberlin is known for its lyrics. Listeners see that “One last glance from a taxicab” in “DISMANTLE.REPAIR.” The stakes in today’s song don’t feel real because the opponent doesn’t feel rounded. It’s defeatist, and the speaker is left defeated, not really learning anything from the game other than to trust no one. He says “When love’s a game, bet on betrayal.” It’s like we haven’t learned anything since the sophomoric Never Take Friendship Personal.
CALLED YOUR BLUFF, YOU DOUBLED DOWN. Discussing “High Stakes” only as a song is pretty straightforward. The song’s video, though, adds more to the discussion of who Anberlin is today. Last month, I talked about the music video for “Dead American,” which was the beginning of the band’s low-production DIY videos. Before “Dead American,” Anberlin’s videos were mostly performance-based and quite serious. Not only in their music videos, the band’s shows also had a serious tone. Lead singer Stephen Christian and occasionally guitarist Christian McAlhaney addressed the crowd before spending most of the time playing music. But during the pandemic, the band started changing their image. Stephen was no longer the only voice speaking for the band, with every member, except bassist Deon Rexroat, miked and commenting on each song. Deon did try to contribute to the conversation without a mic, which led to some funny band and fan interactions. The lockdown concerts shed the clean-cut youth-group-approved version of the band. A few f-bombs, drinking, smoking, and a few allusions to liberal politics seemed off-brand from the band’s prime. The band’s three music videos with Stephen Christian in the Vega era were a return to seriousness for the band, but the first video with Matty Mullins, “Walk Alone,” is a comedic video about auditions for a new lead singer. “High Stakes,” while not plot-driven like “Walk Alone,” the video is more comedic than many of the band’s other videos. The video features the band members in various scenes performing and joking together. The plot culminates in the band and their crew learning a silly dance as if they have become a boy band. Watching the video closely, viewers can see that the beginning credits imitate a movie, listing Jacob Moniz as the producer and the band’s drummer Nate Young and Moniz as the directors. There’s also an “R” rating for the video, which at first seems to be to create a gritty homage to Vegas crime films. It turns out, at a close viewing of the video, the R-rating isn’t completely nominal. In the scene where the band is standing on the bleachers, Nate’s sweatpants have enough “Fuck You”s to exceed a PG-13 rating. While this wardrobe issue can be edited for broadcast on music video channels, it does make me wonder about Anberlin’s future inclusion in the Christian Rock market. While several Christian Rock bands have started including profanity in their songs and their live shows, it seems that Anberlin is rebranding. Stephen Christian had said that he didn’t know if all the members of Anberlin were believers, yet he kept the band grounded in their clean-cut image. He’s said in multiple interviews that he has had regrets about not pastoring his own band. Stephen inviting Mullins into the band seemed to be a way to keep a spiritual element in the band. Mullins is an outspoken Christian and, like Stephen, Mullins has released worship albums. Stakes are high for this new era of Anberlin and Spotify numbers are down from two years ago. But it won’t be until the next era that we will see what the band does with Mullins’ tenure.
In 2015, Abandon Kansas was making a comeback by signing with Emery’s BadChristian Music. The new label allowed the band to express a less-filtered offering of songs. Their third record, alligator, explored themes of doubt, mental health, and addiction. After releasing the album in May, the band hit the road supporting other bands on tour, but in June, Jeremy Spring announced on Facebook that Abandon Kansas would be going on an indefinite hiatus. Spring’s since-deleted post alluded to the mental health issues he was struggling with as well as the need to be close to family. The band reunited to play a few shows; however, Spring and the band members put their efforts into other projects. In 2019, Abandon Kansas rebranded as Glass Age and released Bloom, a three-song EP, taking the band in a different direction.
I MIGHT BE AFRAID OF JOY. Abandon Kansas mostly toured in the Christian Rock scene from their formation until their 2015 hiatus. While they enjoyed some Christian radio success and even headlined tours, Abandon Kansas was always more of a supporting act for bigger Christian Rock bands. Glass Age seems to have distanced themselves from the genre, playing more shows in their home state of Kansas rather than embarking on national tours. After releasing Bloom in 2019, Glass Age started working on their debut LP with producer J. Hall in Nashville. According to their Instagram page, Glass Age said that their first record was finished in 2022; however, they have only released three singles as of 2024. After releasing “(a)merican [i]dle” last September, the band hasn’t posted anything on their Instagram account. Glass Age’s music sounds like a more mature Abandon Kansas with maybe a more solid band and more nuanced lyrics. Hearing the full album would be nice, but the lack of promotion for this band is worrying.
YOU CAN KEEP ME AT AN ARM’S LENGTH, HONEY. Thesecond Glass Age released leading up to their yet-to-be-released full album was “separateness.” The song explores the theme of emotional distance. The song captures the tension between two poles: the desire for connection and the fear of vulnerability. The repetition of “in separateness” underscores how the speaker feels stuck in this cycle, unable to fully break through emotional barriers. Two parties must decide to make a connection. Abandon Kansas dealt with this theme on their debut album, You Build a Wall, I’ll Build a Ladder. The title represents two songs about a broken relationship. The speaker in Glass Age’s “separateness” is not as determined in “I’ll Build a Ladder.” Rather, staying in separateness is a solution until things are resolved. Furthermore, the speaker in “separateness” goes through changes in perspective, starting at being“afraid of joy” but then “not [being] afraid of heartache” as is to be expected when separateness prevails. Jeremy Spring hasn’t talked about this song, and the band’s limited social media can only make speculate what this song could be about. But with a country divided politically and religiously, separateness has become how many of us cope. Facts and appeals to emotions often don’t work on loved ones, so we have to learn to embrace the separateness. Building a ladder is only matched with a higher wall. Maybe we should be ready to reconcile, but prepared for nothing to happen, to keep loved ones at arm’s length away.
Check out the Apple Music edition of this month’s playlist.
You can read the original post about this song from last year. I might have been a bit off with the interpretation as I’ve learned more about Conan Gray.
Mixtapemotions 