1. ONCE IN ROYAL DAVID’S CITY (3:28)
One of my wife Mary’s favorite holiday traditions is watching the King’s College “Nine Lessons and Carols” concert on PBS. Apparently, every year all the boys in the choir learn the opening to “Once in Royal David’s City” and the director points at one boy right before the curtain goes up, and that boy becomes the first voice of the concert, singing this song. So, putting this song first is a subtle inside joke about this tradition.
2. GOD REST YE MERRY GENTLEMEN (3:33)
This is among my most favorite of the songs in this collection. Notably, most of the synths I used on this song are freeware, so it just goes to show you what you can do with free software. I like the way there are so many different themes that sound at first like completely distinct melodies, and then they all go together, and the whole structure of the song makes sense. This song is what “Christmas and Glowsticks” is all about.
3. AWAY IN A MANGER (3:08)
I was, in fact, going for a bit of a Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams” feel on this. Late in the process, I turned up the tempo, which took this arrangment out of the “Sweet Dreams” tempo. It still rocks. Adding to the 80s vibe, I threw in the “You Can Call Me Al” trumpet section near the end of the song.
4. ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH (4:43)
I found this awesome bouncy little synth sound one night and started improvising the “Away In A Manger” riff that repeats a few times at the beginning of the song. I put a couple of arpeggiators running over it, and then added the weird almost ambient drums to it–the “Shuck Snap Chshhhh!” which sound pretty cool. My intention was to have a hip hop section in the middle, but I never could get that to sound right. It was too fast, or too melodic, or too whatever; so I made it sound the way it does, and gave up on the hip hop thing.
5. SILENT NIGHT (4:45)
This was the fastest created song on the album. I put it together in about four hours (and then endless tweaking). I got this really cool little freeware mellotron plugin instrument, and playing the Silent Night theme in minor with the mellotron inspired the whole song. I found the bossa-nova drums, and they seemed to beg for an upright bass (which, along with the vibraphone, are some of the only acoustic-sounding “real” instrument on the whole album). Then I added all the synth weirdness–weird theramin duets. And once I realized I was going for a cocktail vibe, I pulled out the vibraphone. ’Cause what says cocktail party more than a jazzy vibraphone?
6. WE THREE KINGS OF ORIENT ARE (2:57)
This was the transitional song on the album, when I started really trying to break my original intention of making an album of “synth and variations”. The song is pretty cool for the first minute with those staccatto reverbed voices, and then it breaks into the house section and becomes a dance song. This isn’t really a club song because there’s too much melody and not enough drum and bass repetitions. In the middle of this song is a little experiment with formant voice synths. It sounds to me like little robot elves trying to sing in harmony. Perhaps robot munchkins.
7. IT CAME UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR (3:43)
I always save my favorite song for track seven (it’s where Beck put “Where It’s At” on Odelay). Anyway, my intention on this song was to put together a song in the genre of trance. I didn’t quite hit the mark, but the song is still very danceable. What sets this song, and most songs on the album, apart from real house or trance music is that I am constantly pushing the melody and countermelody. I rarely give the bass and backbeat any time to just fill in eight or sixteen bars–I always feel the need to fill it in with melody and other cleverness.
8. O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL (4:36)
This song has the most traditional opening of any on the album. It’s a bit of a synth fanfare. Then it hits the dancey section. In many songs on the album I experimented with synths that had formant filters–elements in the synth that cause it to sound a bit like a human singer. On this song, I spent a lot of time twisting knobs on the singing synth to get it to sound more human, but still synthesized. It took a while to get the arpeggiated melody just right in the second half of the song, but at the end of the day, it sounds pretty cool. The bass on this song is quite playful. This is one of the earlier songs, and definitely conforms to my original goal of “synth and variations”.
9. TWAS IN THE MOON OF WINTERTIME (2:45)
I realized at some point in the creation of the album that whenever I got stuck, a way out was to find what I came to call “a dirty sound” and drop it into the song. This song, as written, is already in a minor key, which makes my arranging easier.
10. O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM (3:44)
This song took me two or three months to make, and I did about eight versions that went nowhere and I had to shelve them over and over. It wasn’t until I embraced the idea of just setting the whole song in minor and putting in the Egyptian flute for the bridges that it came to life. And yes, that is a synthy sitar under the shakuhachi. Around 1:55 we hit a harder more distorted section, which I derived from a variation on “Tainted Love”.
11. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (4:15)
This is the slow-dance track on the album. It was the other most difficult song on the CD (after “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. I abandoned about six full versions of this song before coming up with this one. The inspiration for this was Jan Hammer’s “Crockett’s Theme” from Miami Vice. What I end up with sounds very little like Jan Hammer’s theme, but there are subtle nods his direction.
12. WHAT CHILD IS THIS? (3:47)
This is the first song that was made for this collection. I arranged it in a dorm room in Edmonton, Alberta Canada during the day, while at night I was playing keyboards for the improv comedy festival The Improvaganza. It’s a great festival, and if you’re in Edmonton in late June, you should stop in. With shows every night, I had a ton of time to work on music in my dorm room, so I knocked out this song. In context of the whole album, this song doesn’t sound like the first one I arranged. Because of its complexity, it sounds more like a later project. There’s some subtle humor and complicated countermelodies and arpeggiations going on in here. I panned all the various melodic lines all around the stereo field to make it more easy for the listener to distinguish them all.
