Seasonal Sounds
Winters, holidays, music, and (making) memories.
What do the winter holidays sound like, to you?
The winter holidays, specifically Christmas, mean a lot to me. I was raised Catholic, but more importantly I was raised in a household of seven, all of whom were given, and made, wonderful Christmas seasons for each other. It’s a rare luxury, and it has benefited me greatly. Counting my age in years, lines quickly get blurred and memories get lost in the shuffle. But counting my age in Christmases, a mere 32 total days, is remarkably simple. I can crunch the entirety of my existence into one month of single days. Celebrating, and remembering, and leaning into the farce and decoration of it all is a tangible pleasure that is unbound by time and space. I learn more each year I am alive that this is absolutely not a universal experience, and, contrary to what it felt like to an 8-year-old Catholic boy, Christmas is not a universal holiday. But winters are universal (insert joke about people who live in Flagstaff, AZ), and holidays can be, and music and sound and memory are tools that we can all use to travel through and crunch time to the past. Let’s talk about those, specifically.
This is what the winter holidays sound like, to me:
Sleigh bells
Okay, this is an obvious one. That’s on me. They’re called “sleigh” bells, for goodness sake. Has anyone used them for anything other than Christmas music? Honestly, please let me know, that sounds like a cool idea. Anyways, sleigh bells, to a kid who played percussion in the school band, are very cool. They are wondrously satisfying to shake and bump around. They can invoke the magical sleigh that brings goodies to your door, sure, but they are also just a pleasant, light, fun sound. I especially like their employment on this Khruangbin song, which is just a standard, if not slight, Khruangbin song, except they added in a sleigh bell. The way it slowly fades in at the beginning makes it the perfect holiday playlist intro track.
This Playlist
I blew the big surprise for this piece right in the first entry with that “perfect holiday playlist intro track” line. In 2018, I started making a playlist that would embody the entirety of the Christmastime experience; not just the classic Christmas-focused mega-hits – hopefully explicitly not those songs at all – but the wide range of winter songs, songs about New Years and snow and cuddling close to your partner by the fire. I’ve added songs, I’ve removed songs, I’ve had songs taken off of Spotify, by Spotify, for some strange reason. Notedly, I did not want to share this playlist with the public until I had it properly sequenced (the first four tracks are, by the way), but I have come to realize that this list is too fluid, as are my feelings towards holiday songs, to do “perfect sequencing” any just. So please, listen at your leisure this holiday season – on random if you’d like to, because it unfortunately doesn’t matter all that much.
Good time of day, reader. This is future Bobby, who has edited this and slept once or twice on the idea of doing more sequencing. I always wanted this list to sound like the ups and downs of a winter break: the excitement of waking up to a day of vacation in front of you, the joys of the weather, followed by the onset of long hours of darkness in which contemplation and maybe some sadness creep in. Also, I wanted it to follow a calendar of sorts: talk of the changing weather, the snow, the promise of christmas, the anticipation of christmas, and the big night before, and the big day of. Anyways, continue listening on random and ignoring all of this. Happy listening!
The entire Bill Evans discography
Bill really turned himself over to me when I first found and listened to “Skating in Central Park”, a track from his 1962 record Undercurrent. If you had listened to this song without knowing the title – shit, wait, should I have let you do that somehow? – you would likely not have associated it with holiday music. But, for me, having seen the title before listening and while clicking on the link to listen to it, I had the stage set to link it to other holiday sounds. The masterful piano playing and something about the construction of the song, the chords used, the progressions used, I’m not sure, something connected it seamlessly with the canonical Christmas sounds of Vince Guaraldi and his Charlie Brown music. Which is, of course, also what the holidays sound like. The entirety of Undercurrent is great, and through “Skating in Central Park”, is now a holiday album.
Harps
The thing I love about hearing a harp played, in person as well as in recordings, is that I can hear space: the space in the room that the harp is being played, the space between the notes the harp plays, the spaces between the strings on the harp as the player plucks or picks or strums down the line. It’s a cavernous space, even in their potentially close physical proximity. Cavernous is a good word for what winter and the holidays feel like, to me. If you grow up in a snowy suburban space, you’ve probably never felt anything more cavernous and spacious and blank than a winter night in the snow with an active snowfall around you. The blankness of the color, the suffocation of sound that its wet blanket provides, and the brightness of its sheen, reflecting what little moonlight there ever is, showing you that you are surrounded by nothing, by blankness. That’s what I hear when I listen to a harp. Listen to Dorothy Ashby work her magic in “Moonlight in Vermont”, and tell me you’re not walking down a slippery street in the middle of a snowy moonlit night somewhere.
Nemo’s Dreamscapes
Ok, this is a strange one. I feel like I’m telling on myself. Nemo’s Dreamscapes is a YouTube channel that is basically always livestreaming, and it exists to recreate one very specific sound: “oldies”, muffled and dampened, with crickets and other white noise layered over the top, all in an effort to mimic the experience of listening to music from the room next door. What is more Christmas than laying in your room, watiting for what comes next, listening in to hear what could or should be happening in the other room? I can still connect with that emotional version of myself, sometimes, and I’m helped along by this source, which I will throw on while I write or do chores, or maybe even while I drift off to sleep, too excited to turn in on my own.
The Muppets
If you ask me – which you are, because “you” is me as I type this on my keyboard – John Denver and The Muppets’ A Christmas Together is the christmas album of the Gough family. Everyone loves the Muppets, so that box is easily checked, and everyone loves John Denver, so there’s two checks down immediately. Do you love fake characters nakedly talking and attempting jokes during famous christmas songs, or singing folk songs in the middle of Christmas records for some reason? So does everyone. Check, check, check, check. The Muppets are Christmas.
Crunching Snow, Crunching Paper
An inescapable sound in the dead of winter in northern Illinois is the impossibly saturated brown-black dirty snow that gets caked into near concrete by cars and passers-by after days of snow. Every step is treacherous, and makes a frustratingly similar but snowflake-like unique crunch under your big winter boots. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Uphill both directions anywhere you go. Its emotional opposite is the gripping and ripping of wrapping paper of the gifts you find under the tree. It makes the sound of the release of anticipation, the joy of receiving, the joy of giving, the joy of surprise. The crunching of the paper as you ball it up to sink a jump shot across the room to the bag of discarded paper? Perfect. It doesn’t matter if the present was socks from your mother (please, Mom, if you’re reading this: I need winter socks), unwrapping things can be the world’s biggest joy.
Am I saying “crunching” too much?
Bing Crosby
He’s the singer my mom listened to the most during Christmas. Everything he does is Christmas to me, now, especially whatever this is with David Bowie:
Men Screaming
Whatever Weird Things My Family Talks About
Christmas is one of the few times of year that my family is all together, which is mainly my doing as the geographical outlier (sorry, mom and dad). For the whole time-crunching idea, this is important. I’ve spent (nearly) every Christmas with them, for the entirety of my existence. For a while there, I had lived every day with all seven family members in the same house. Waking up and spending a day with them was not special, or something I even considered as something that could be different. And then, for many reasons, that just changed one day. And now, years later, it was a minority of my life that I spent with my entire family in one house, and that minority shrinks with every passing moment. It is a state of being that is fading, as all things do through time. But playing a certain song or two, taking a walk at night or two, buying a plane ticket or two, keeps that state of being alive, and keeps it in the present tense, rather than the past tense. Fading, but not faded. So whatever it is my family brings to the holiday table, whatever weird songs they play or things they say, I’ll keep listening.
Sleigh Bells
Yep, that’s right, the bells are back. I can’t let you leave without sharing my favorite Christmas song find of the last couple years; another perfect playlist starter: “Soul Santa” by Funk Machine.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I know that winters are hard, and I know that holidays can be harder. Whoever and wherever you are, I hope there are songs and sounds out there that can bring you warmth, and light, and some version of joy. I hope you can make your own playlist, your own collection of warmths and reminders, and that you hold onto those, to break out in case of emergency.
Additionally, I would love to hear what winter or these holidays sound like to each of you. There are an uncountable amount of insane covers of Christmas songs, by seemingly every musical group that has ever existed. You must have some gems in your pocket. I would love to hear them.
That’s it for now. I’ll be back soon with *gulp* a one-year Something New anniversary entry.
TTFN,
B