Artificial Intelligence (AI) made itself part of this year’s music story with AI acts The Velvet Sundown, TaTa Taktumi and Breaking Rust making news one way or another.

This week, Ken Kessler of the podcast The Sounds of Christmas and Gerry D from the Totally Rad Christmas podcast join me to talk about the way AI Christmas music foreshadowed some of this. We talk about an early effort created by University of Toronto researchers, “Rudolph the All-Gracious King” and it’s companion how-it’s-done video), and the heavy metal “Christmas Overdrive.” We also talked about faux-vintage Christmas songs posted at the RAI Music page.

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 Beach Boys’ Christmas Album are Christmas classics that needed to be addressed, but how or with who? The answer came when Oglio Records announced that it planned to reissue a 25th anniversary edition of Brian Wilson: Live at the Roxy. The promotional efforts behind that release put a number of possible interviews at my disposal.

This week, writer David Leaf talks about Brian in 2000 and 1963’s The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album. Leaf has written liner notes for numerous Beach Boys and Brian Wilson releases, and wrote The Beach Boys and the California Myth (1978) and SMiLE: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of Brian Wilson, which was released earlier this year.

In the episode, I mentioned the new Beach Boys’ holiday EP A Little Saint Nick Christmas with The Beach Boys. It’s all previously released songs and mixes, but it’s on sale now.

I also mentioned the upcoming Strange Daisy Christmas, a compilation of Christmas songs by the New Orleans indie community on Strange Daisy Records. You can order it now online from Bandcamp.

I featured Loucey’s version of Darlene Love’s “Christmas (bAbYpLeAze CoMeHoMe)” in the episode, and earlier in the year I interviewed Cherie McCabe of Loucey after the release of their debut album, Participation Trophy Wife.

Next week, I’ll be back with more on Brian Wilson when I talk to musician Probyn Gregory about playing in Brian’s band in concert and in the studio when he recorded his 2005 solo Christmas album, What I Really Want for Christmas.

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 goof became a project that stretched him as an artist. We hear music from all phases of his Christmas career including (in order):

1. “Home Alone Pt. 1”

2. “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”

3. “All I Want for Christmas is You”

4. “A Step-Mother’s First (and Worst) Christmas Ever”

5. “Merry Christmas Baby”

6. “Christmas Without You”

7. “Hard Candy Christmas”

8. “Silver, Never Gold”

9. “What Are You Doing (on Christmas Eve)?”

10. “Pack Your Bags!”

We also hear a new song, “A Very Gen X Christmas” from The Static Dive.

In my conversation with Kristian, I mention the episode on Hanson with Isaac Hanson, and the one that traces the musical life of “Hard Candy Christmas.” 

Since streamed playlists and all-Christmas radio are the way most people hear Christmas music, they’re fascinations of mine. This week I’m back on the radio beat with long-time radio guy Kevin Robinson.

I wanted to talk to Kevin when I saw a post he wrote for the industry site Barrett Media on best practices for the all-Christmas format shift.  Since we talked, he interviewed me along with station programmers about programming Christmas stations and playlists.

In the episode, we hear music from The Glad Singers’ awesome Christmas with a Beat.

We also hear “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” by The Carpenters, “Frosty the Snowman” by Esquivel, “O Tannenbaum” by Vince Guaraldi Trio, and “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande.

The episode finishes with the audio from a performance of a Christmas version of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” performed at a benefit fundraiser in Washington, DC with an audience that included President Barack Obama and his family. The video is worth seeing to fully appreciate the moment.

Photo by selim buka on Unsplash.

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-Mart Shoppers,” a digitized collection of that background music at the Internet Archive (archive.org, not archive.com as I announced on the show).

Others have since contributed parts of the K-Mart and Kresge’s lore, augmenting his collection with tapes and vinyl records distributed 10 to 15 years earlier than Davis’ time with the one-time retail giant. Oddly, where Christmas music is concerned, it changed very little from decade to decade, and while Christmas 1990 has nods to modernity, there were still easy listening favorites including The Living Strings and Perry Como.

The episode deals with the enduring legacy of a formal, lightly orchestral musical ideal and the way certain musical values were assumed to be immutable. That’s a subject for future conversations, but we start it here.

In this episode, I played a number of songs without identifying them. Frequently, the artist or song is obvious, but that’s not the case this week. You hear in order:

1. “Let It Snow” – Ferrante & Teicher

2. “Winter Wonderland” – Frank DeVol and the Rainbow Strings

3. “The Christmas Song” – Al Hirt (from an amazing Christmas album, The Sound of Christmas)

4. “This Christmas” – The Jets

5. “Christmas Tree” – The Glad Singers

This episode also has information on JD McPherson’s Christmas tour this year. McPherson’s Socks is one of my favorite modern Christmas albums, and we had a good conversation about it on the podcast in 2019.

Finally, we ended with The Weather Girls’ “Dear Santa (Bring Me a Man This Christmas).” The song benefits from the video treatment.

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 Billboard.

“Mariah Carey is SUED AGAIN over All I Want For Christmas Is You… as two writers claim her 1994 classic is a ripoff of their song of the same name” according to The Daily Mail.

“Mariah Carey Sued By Random Man For Allegedly Stealing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ From Him,” according to Pedestrian.tv.

The story of Andy Stone from New Orleans’ Vince Vance and the Valiants’ copyright infringement lawsuit over “All I Want for Christmas is You” was never taken seriously, as if the idea of suing Mariah Carey was absurd on its face. Withdrawing the suit once and re-filing it probably didn’t help, but Valiant/Stone got to market first with a song titled “All I Want for Christmas is You” in 1989, five years before Carey’s. It charted in the 30s on country radio and showed some durability including covers by LeAnn Rimes and Kelly Clarkson among others.

Carey’s song will never be mistaken for the Vince Vance and the Valiants’ song, but the specifics of copyright law dictate that there are other tests of copyright infringement, so the suit wasn’t obviously as frivolous as some headline writers implied.

This week’s episode tells the story as we know it so far based on media coverage. Along the way, we hear Vince Vance’s version, along with Kelly Clarkson and LeAnn Rimes’ versions. We also hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” along with the version from Love Actually and covers by She & Him and PJ Morton.

These days, we take the all-Christmas radio format for granted. Every year, countless adult contemporary–AC–stations temporarily change their format and go wall to wall with Christmas music somewhere between Halloween and Black Friday. Jerry Ryan gets the credit for pioneering the switch when he was vice president and general manager of KESZ-FM in Phoenix in 1990. Once he did it in a market the size of Phoenix, others followed in his footsteps.

This week, Jerry Ryan tells radio stories, remembering his journey to the holiday season in 1990 and the thought process that led him to all-Christmas radio.

If you’d like more on all-Christmas radio, you can check out a piece I wrote for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune in 2016, and my Twelve Songs episode with Steve Suter, program director for New Orleans’ Magic 101.9. Suter’s Christmas programming runs counter to some of Ryan’s thoughts on the subject, but in other ways his ideas about radio line up nicely.

The episode ends with one of my favorite categories of Christmas song–the holiday adaptation of a seasonal hit. One year, I couldn’t get enough of “Macarena Christmas (Joy Mix),” and this week we’re going back to 1993 when the vocal group H-Town turned the sexy slow jam “Knockin’ da Boots” into “Knockin’ Boots for Christmas” for the holiday season.

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 now and might be done. He played bass in the band since its start in 2008, and he reflects not on his band specifically but how musicians grow apart.

As É Arenas, he has recorded at least one Christmas song a year since 2017, and what started as a challenge turned into a tradition. We talk about traditions and he helps me get a better handle on Mexican Christmas music while we talk about his own “Cumbia Navideñas”–a sound that is his own, half-joking invention following in the footsteps of Salsa Navideñas.

Along the way, we visit Christmas music from Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe, Rigo Tovar, and the inescapable “Mi Burrito Sabañero.”

A new season of Twelve Songs begins with a conversation that is, frankly, more about AI—artificial intelligence—than it is Christmas music, but since we’re six months from the holiday, it seems like a good time for this conversation.

Last year, I interviewed Steven Wilson of the British prog rock band Porcupine Tree about “December Skies,” a song he recorded on his own with lyrics written in part by Chat GPT, an AI program. We talked about the whys and hows and considered some of the issues connected to AI. At a time when the reflexive stance toward it is skeptical, I was glad to talk to an artist who is working out a more nuanced relationship to it.

Part of this interview ran last year, but this is the first chance I’ve had to run it in its entirety.

This conversation has become more relevant with the success of the AI “group” Velvet Sundown and the recent controversy over an AI imitation of the rock band Toto appearing for a short time on the band’s Spotify page.

The episode ends with The Soul Duo’s “Just a Sad Xmas,” which is on sale now through the Numero Group.