Season seven of 12 Songs comes to a conclusion with three very different conversations and artists. Ha-Sizzle is one of the finest examples of the New Orleans-specific brand of hip-hop known as bounce. I talked to him about his Christmas in New Orleans in front of a live audience.  The members of the British punk band Goddammit Jeremiah talk about their irreverent approach to Christmas and Christmas music and share a few of their holiday favorites that haven't made much of an impact here in the States.  At the end of an interview with MacMcCaughan of Superchunk for another ..read more

We're approaching Christmas, so this week I have excerpts from longer interviews that I'll run at full length next season. Steven Wilson is the driving force behind the British art rock band Porcupine Tree, and last year on a challenge he used artificial intelligence to write a Christmas song, something he felt that he couldn't do on his own. The whole conversation goes deep on the relationship between artists and AI, and the odd experience of encountering an AI version of himself online. Here I tried to capture part of that conversation and keep it relatively focused on Christmas.  I hav ..read more

We're officially in December, the Christmas season, and I have more interviews than I can get through in the weeks leading up to Christmas. From here on in, I'll run excerpts from the interviews I've done, and I'll run them in their entirety next season.  This episode starts with some clean-up business after last week's conversation with Midge Ure on "Do They Know it's Christmas." I referenced Ed Sheeran's complaint that he would have preferred to be left off the 40th anniversary mega-mix, and the charges against the song by Fuse ODG. In the episode, I reference Bob Geldof responding to c ..read more

Midge Ure from The Rich Kids, Ultravox and Visage co-wrote and produced "Do They Know it's Christmas" 40 years ago this week on November 25, 1984. He recently released a new live album, Live at the Royal Albert Hall 04.10.23, so we talked about that, touring, the Blitz club and his memories of the sessions for "Do They Know it's Christmas."  In this episode, I talk a little more than usual to contextualize the song and the interview. We talk about the new 40th anniversary mega-mix, which is due out Friday but the video is already out. I'll talk more about it next week. I also mention ..read more

Husband and wife duo Dean & Britta have a sound that suits contemporary Christmas music beautifully. They've done a few movie soundtracks including 13 Most Beautiful, an album of songs commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum to perform songs beneath Warhol's silent films shot between 1964 - 1966.  Their sound is evocative but spare, with deeply reverbed guitars and melodic touches that bring '60s scenes to mind without being stuck there. On A Peace of Us, they and frequent collaborator Sonic Boom from Spaceman 3 work a similar magic. It's easy to envision it as part of the so ..read more

Twelve Songs goes to Las Vegas this week, first to talk with Sally Olson and Ned Mills of the tribute act Carpenters Legacy about The Carpenters and their Christmas music. This year, they took their affection for both subjects to the natural conclusion and recorded "Christmas Time with You," a Christmas song made in the mold of the Carpenters.  After that, I talk to comedian and ventriloquist April Brucker, who released a song sung by her and her puppet May Wilson, "Merry Christmas I'm So Glad I Didn't Marry You." We talk about ventriloquism, novelty songs, and the age-old tradition of us ..read more

Earlier this season, I interviewed The Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood about his ambivalent relationship with Christmas music. This week I talk to the Truckers' long-time guitarist Jay Gonzalez, who takes a different path to a similar place. We talk about his relationship to the band as a full-time member since 2008 who isn't Hood, Mike Cooley, or long-time drummer Brad Morgan, and his love of Christmas songs that might or might not be Christmas songs. Along the way, I play music from his Roll Up a Song by Gonzalez Smith and Jay Gonzalez Inflatable Orchestra Vol. 1.   ..read more

I've been out of the country, so this week is an encore presentation with two very different artists--pop instrumental piano player Jim Brickman and Jeff Plate, the long-time drummer for the arena rock band Trans-Siberian Orchestra. When I conducted these interviews in 2020, I was really interested in how COVID-19 would affect two acts that have made holiday season tours a meaningful part of their business. I could imagine Brickman's music translating to a live-streamed show, but TSO delivers sensory overload with four forms of fire (if I remember correctly) and a lighting rig that itself move ..read more

This week I'm talking with blues artist Jontavious Willis, who recently released his album West Georgia Blues.  I wanted to talk to Jontavious not because of his Christmas music--he doesn't have any yet--but because he's doing something that I've been trying to pay attention to as people make contemporary music in traditional forms. We go a little longer with Jontavious talking about the blues in general to help get at that thought a bit.  But we also got to a number of his favorite blues Christmas songs, and I like that he's not doctrinaire in his choices, folding in Rev. J.M ..read more

This season has featured surf Christmas music, calypso Christmas music, Sicilian Christmas music and smooth jazz Christmas music, so it can't be too much of a surprise that we finally get to Cajun Christmas music. I think Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys are an important band as they picked up the work of maintaining endangered musical traditions that was started by a generation before him, and he influenced the generation that followed by finding contemporary ways to express those traditions. In today's interview, we talk about Feufollet's Chris Stafford, who I wrote about shortly after he ..read more