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 have a challenge for next season though, because he talked about his favorite album being a Christmas album by The Hiltonaires. I’ve seen it under two different titles, and he thinks there might be more. Unfortunately, none of them are for sale in any of the digital stores, so I couldn’t find any music from it that I could play in this episode. If any of you have digitized a Christmas track from the Hiltonaires, please let me know.

The second interview is with É Arenas, the long-time bass player with Chicano Batman. We talk about his relationship with the band as it enters an “indefinite hiatus,” and how he started a yearly project of making songs that he considered Cumbia Navideña–a genre he invited with cumbias for the holiday.

We only get part way though his catalogue of seasonal music, but in addition to talking about his own music, he turned me on to the Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón classic Asalto Navideño and music by Rigo Tovar.

Then I talk to Kelcy Wilburn of New Orleans’ Americana band Ever More Nest. In 2015, I wrote a story for The New Orleans Advocate on her first Christmas song, “Christmas with You (Merry Me),” which at the time doubled as a Christmas song and a celebration of the Supreme Court affirming the rights of same-sex couples to marry. As she explains, it also served as a quasi-proposal to her partner.

We talk about that, the Christmas music of her youth, and the way life as a working musician led to her new Christmas EP, Merry Little Thing.

This episode also features new Christmas music from Sara Noelle, Kristian Noel Pederson, and Popular Muzak.

If you’d like this year’s exclusive listeners-only Christmas mix, email me at alex@myspiltmilk.com.

Finally, follow, subscribe or do what you have to do to get 12 Songs in your podcast feed. We only have one more episode after this in 2024, then we’ll return in time for Christmas in July 2025. If we’re in your feed, new episodes will show up without you having to hunt for them.