![\"shehim-christmas\"](\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/shehim-christmas-300x300.jpg\")
A few days ago, the Guardian<\/i> reviewed A Very She & Him Christmas<\/i><\/a>, one of my most anticipated albums of the autumn<\/a>. Reviewer Alexis Petridis did not like aVS&HC<\/i>; he said the album “doesn’t feel melancholy so much as joyless.” I thought about that. I didn’t quite<\/i> agree with Petridis, not exactly. When the album arrived in the mail, complete with She & Him wrapping paper, I listened to it a few times, mainly at work as background music while I wrote, and it didn’t make an impression on me. Then on Friday, as I left the office, I saw the CD sitting on my desk, peeking out from under a pile of papers, and I shoved it into my bag so I could listen to it on the drive home. To my great frustration, I managed to listen to the album twice, beginning to end, all thanks to an accident that snarled traffic rather badly.<\/p>\nThere were things I liked, and there were things I didn’t like, and it took a discussion about the Jethro Tull Christmas album for me to understand why. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Yesterday on Facebook, a friend wrote that he was surprised that there was<\/i> a Jethro Tull Christmas album. There are actually two, I think — there’s the first edition that came out, and then there was an expanded edition that came out a year or two later.<\/p>\n
Many musicians do Christmas albums these days. Just stop in Target and look at the section of Christmas music, and you’ll see acts big and small with a Christmas EP or full album. One of my favorite bands, Carbon Leaf, released one last year, Christmas Child<\/a><\/i>, which I enjoyed a lot. Ringo Starr’s album, I Wanna Be Santa Claus<\/i>, is one of his best albums. Christmas albums don’t really get a lot of notice from the music press unless they’re really expected, like Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart<\/i>.<\/p>\n There are two kinds of modern Christmas albums.<\/p>\n There’s the album by a musician or band that happens to be about<\/i> Christmas. This is where the Carbon Leaf and Jethro Tull albums both fall. Carbon Leaf’s Christmas Child<\/i> is all original compositions, while Jethro Tull’s album is mostly<\/i> original compositions. Then there’s the Barenaked Ladies’ Christmas album, which has a lot of familiar songs done in a completely unexpected manner. Because these albums have either new or mostly new music, they have more room to breath creativity.<\/p>\n Then there’s the album that happens to have a musician or band singing Christmas songs. The musician is covering a familiar Christmas tune. Sometimes, the musician brings something new to it. Oftentimes, the musician doesn’t. This is where Bob Dylan’s album falls.<\/p>\n I prefer the first category of Christmas albums — either something original or something familiar done in an unexpected style (like The Fab Four’s Beatlesque Christmas albums). The latter category? Not so much. It’s the familiarity factor.<\/p>\n However, I love Dylan’s Christmas album, just because it is so<\/i> awful. It’s laugh-out-loud hilarious.<\/p>\n This brings me back to A Very She & Him Christmas<\/i>.<\/p>\n The reason I’m ambivalent about the album is that it straddles both. It’s an album of halves — half of the album is a She & Him album, half of the album is She & Him doing Christmas songs. It’s a subtle distinction, I know, and I feel like the first album works while the second album doesn’t quite<\/i>.<\/p>\n The first album, the “She & Him album that happens to be Christmas songs,” is the lesser-known Christmas songs. To be honest, I thought “The Christmas Waltz,” “Christmas Day,” and “Christmas Wish” were all original compositions; if I’ve heard any of these songs in their original versions, I’ve long since forgotten them. (We do have 24\/7 Christmas radio over here, and in spite of my love of Christmas music, I’ve found I can only listen to it for maybe an hour at a time because the same songs get played ad nauseum<\/i>.) I didn’t even realize that “Christmas Day” was a Beach Boys composition, and I think it would have made a better album opener than “The Christmas Waltz.” But there are familiar songs that also work as She & Him songs, like “Baby It’s Cold Outside” (or, as we called it at work a few days ago, “the date rape Christmas song”).<\/p>\n The second album, the “Christmas songs sung by She & Him,” is a bunch of old favorites, like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” These songs are, I think, too<\/i> familiar — in those times that I’ve listened to the 24\/7 Christmas radio station, I’ve generally heard them both — and my reaction to them is, “Oh, not another<\/i> take on this song.” Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward aren’t doing anything wrong<\/i> with these songs, they perform them quite well, but I also don’t feel that they’re doing anything revolutionary with the songs and making them their own. Maybe they should have chosen less-familiar Christmas songs to cover. Maybe they should have written something original to celebrate the season. Maybe.<\/p>\n I’ve listened to A Very She & Him Christmas<\/i> more times than I’ve listened to Volume Two<\/i>, which is an album that I’ve never managed to grapple with in any meaningful way. I like aVS&HC<\/i>, definitely more than the Guardian<\/i>‘s Alexis Petridis did. But even though it’s not a great<\/i> album, even though I don’t understand M. Ward’s Jon Huntsman look, it’s still, in my opinion, She & Him’s second-best. It’s an imperfect album, it doesn’t integrate its two halves as well as it could, and yet I don’t mind. It’s a Christmas album, it’s pleasant to listen to, and that’s alright by me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As many people know, in spite of my infidelic nature, I love Christmas music. I don’t confine myself to the time around the Christmas holidays, either; I’ll listen to a Christmas album in spring or summer just because I feel like it. A few days ago, the Guardian reviewed A Very She & Him Christmas,Continue reading “On A Very She & Him Christmas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[64,79,80,81],"class_list":["post-6164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-christmas","tag-christmas-music","tag-she-him","tag-zooey-deschanel","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}