why’d you ruin christmas??
last week, i put out a new album. maybe you’ve had a chance to hear it by now.
i conceived, wrote, recorded, and marketed it in about 4 months. it felt urgent because we are fast approaching my least favorite time of the year: christmas.
beginning with thanksgiving and ending on new year’s eve, i am pretty much miserable. why? you might ask, because for most people it’s the most wonderful time of the year.
fuck that!
i am not most people, and maybe you aren’t either. for every way that people might suggest the holidays are magical, i can come up with a reason why they are superficial, suffocating, or just sucky. try me.
gosh, you say, it sounds like you’ve just had a bad time with christmas.
it’s true. i have and it feels incredibly personal. in my experience, christmas is the time of year when people go through the motions of community and charity without depth. where families do the kind of things they should have been doing all year round, but with an added aroma of cloying self-righteousness. people have feelings and share time together in a way that they can’t or dont bother trying during the rest of the year. or, worse, we fake these feelings to fufill obligations or maintain propriety. it’s like the holidays give us sanction to be generous, expressive, and warm. and then we go back to our grind.
was it different when i was a kid? sure, until the toys stopped mattering. as an adult, i experience christmas with a persistent feeling of dislocation and alienation. deck the halls!
as a musician, it’s a given that you will participate somehow in what has grown to be an incredibly lucrative time of year for retailers. every label i’ve been on has asked me one way or another to “do something for the holidays”. i obliged one label with a cover of an old bessie smith song about getting drunk in public. for another, i recorded a half-hearted version of “there were bells”, a song i love that i hoped could be considered a “holiday song”. i also did a strange rockabilly version of “what are you doing new year’s?” which never made it past my label’s inbox.
fuck that!
thankfully, i haven’t had too many people try to rehabilitate me around the holidays. there’s been no one who has tried to redeem christmas in my estimation. i guess i’m just too far gone for anyone to attempt it. so, my hatred has mercifully been allowed to deepen and fester, to ripen and mature. and like a good wine, aged to perfection, it’s now ready to be served.
“f*ck that!” initially began as a small group of dark christmas carols i wrote for my friends’ kelsey and hillary’s play, santacide, a slapstick who-dunnit where santa is an offstage voice of corruption and greed who meets his end in the first 5 minutes.
as i worked on the songs this july, i felt something come into focus. it felt so good to skewer christmas! how delicious to turn my bitter memories and private pain into dark humor! i could come clean about my feelings while being dirty, juvenile, and irreverent. i decided to see these feelings to their natural conclusion and make a whole album. and tour. and do a live webcast anti-holiday spectacular.
fuck that!
so far, these songs have been landing how they were intended, with very few misses (at least that i have heard about). people who share the same pain around christmas, folks who can have a good laugh at themselves, or music-lovers who enjoy a clever parody have been enjoying the record. thank you!
i’ve had a few people express some displeasure at my endeavor. some have criticized me for whining. others have called me a hypocrite for critiquing capitalism while asking them to buy my record (PS: it’s not capitalism if you are profiting from YOUR OWN LABOR). a few are upset with me for forcing them to listen to my beliefs, as if i get to choose not to see their holiday decorations, hear holiday music, or get asked what my holiday plans are.
to them i say, where would you like your mariah carey holiday album sent? because i am happy to buy you that one.
for the rest of us, fuck that!
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jwgh reblogged this from theclatterofkeys and added:
Last week I came across...holiday songwriting contest...song...
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one-headlight reblogged this from theclatterofkeys and added:
A big, resounding YES.
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theclatterofkeys posted this
