I finally remembered to start recording my Christmas song early enough in the year so it would be ready to release in time for the holiday season. You could call it an anti-Christmas, or ambivalent, or Jewish Christmas song.
“Merry Xmas*” is available on bandcamp, spotify, apple music, and most other streaming platforms.
I asked Ben Varian to produce – I love his Riddle Rock EP among other works.
We recorded the basic tracks live in February with me on guitar, Nico Leibman from Harmony Index on bass, and Ben on drums.
Ben did a lot of the rest of the arrangements on his own, and we got together to finesse a few things, and I brought over my old toy xylophone for some overdubs. We visited Clinton Patterson who played trumpet, and I recorded my vocals and harmonies at home.
With Ben sporadically on tour, and me sporadically with a toddler cold preventing me from singing, the song wasn’t ready for mastering until early November, much later than I had hoped. I brought it to Stephen Kaye at SunKing Studios for that, and just caught Miles Wintner in time to do the artwork.
I guess I could have started recording in a previous year and been less rushed, but from a motivation standpoint, starting it in, say, the summer, and not releasing it during the upcoming holiday season was not appealing.
I wrote “Merry Xmas*” quickly around 7 years ago when Andrés Du Bouchet invited me to perform at a holiday-themed “Giant Tuesday Night of Amazing Inventions and also There is A Game” at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. Here is a live recording of “Merry Xmas*” from that first performance.
This is my first music release in a few years and it felt like peeling off a band-aid, or breaking a seal, forcing myself to put it out there. I’m hoping this will help me let go and release my next album sooner than later which is in the works.
