The 2025 Christmas Party
Season eight ends with what I hope will be a tradition--a Christmas party, with a few guests and a lot of music. This week's guests include...
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Music
Twelve Songs of Christmas
”The Twelve Songs of Christmas” tries to sort out the place of Christmas music in our culture by talking to the people who make it.
Episodes
20 of 100 episodes
"Asalto Navideño" with Miguel Zenón, and the Ray Conniff Singers
This week’s episode features two interviews—one with Grammy-winning jazz saxophone player Miguel Zenón helping us appreciate the salsa Chris...
Roland Gift, Old Crow Medicine Show, and The Klezmatics
We're in the last weeks before Christmas and I have more interviews than I can handle. This week starts with a version of " Wonderful Christ...
William Shatner, Jane Monheit, and Kelly Finnigan
We're in December now, and this week we have three conversations. William Shatner's face is on the pop culture Mt. Rushmore, and when I had...
AI for Christmas
Artificial Intelligence (AI) made itself part of this year's music story with AI acts The Velvet Sundown, TaTa Taktumi and Breaking Rust mak...
Remembering Brian Wilson Pt. 2: "What I Really Want for Christmas"
Multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory remembers playing and recording with Brian Wilson from 1999 until he retired from live performances in...
Remembering Brian Wilson Pt. 1: "The Beach Boys' Christmas Album"
I started thinking about how to address Brian Wilson’s death on the podcast since we learned of his passing. “Little Saint Nick” and The Bea...
A Ping Pong Kung Fu Christmas with Shawn Lee
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee has a history of making recordings that hover uncertainly in time. Sounds from different eras a...
Kristian Noel Pedersen
Toronto's Kristian Noel Pedersen has released 27 EPs or albums of Christmas music, 26 of which are on his Bandcamp page . What started as a...
Steve Lukather's "Santamental" (an encore presentation)
I've been out of town this week, and when I thought of an episode from the archives to revisit, this one from 2021 with guitar hero Steve Lu...
Doing All-Christmas Radio Right with Kevin Robinson
Since streamed playlists and all-Christmas radio are the way most people hear Christmas music, they're fascinations of mine. This week I'm b...
Sloan
Chris Murphy of the Canadian indie rock band Sloan describes them as "a cult band," but they're a cult band with legs. They started in 1991...
Christmas at K-Mart with Mark Davis
Mark Davis has turned the in-store music cassettes he pocketed while working at a K-Mart in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s into “ Attention K-...
Solo Piano for Christmas with Nick Bhalla
Last year, Minneapolis-based jazz pianist Nick Bhalla released Saint Nick, a lovely album of solo jazz piano treatments of Christmas classic...
The "All I Want for Christmas is You" Lawsuit
The headlines tell a version of the story: “MARIAH CAREY SUED AGAIN OVER ‘ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU’ — BY THE SAME GUY,” according to...
Dub Reggae for Holidays with Black Market Dub
This week's guests are Black Market and Wise Owl (or Nate Bridges and Brandon Niznik) of the Los Angeles-based duo Black Market Dub . On the...
The Birth of All-Christmas Radio with Jerry Ryan
These days, we take the all-Christmas radio format for granted. Every year, countless adult contemporary--AC--stations temporarily change th...
Blind Boys of Alabama on Christmas Music (Remixed)
I think of this episode of Twelve Songs as a remix, a second pass at the same material with very different results. In 2003, The Blind Boys...
"Cumbia Navideñas" with É Arenas
Eduardo Arenas surprised me in the first moments of this week's interview when he revealed that Chicano Batman had played its last gig for n...
Donna Summer for Disco and Christmas
Donna Summer has been a fascination of mine because she was on the cutting edge of electronic dance music, but since "I Feel Love" and other...