I have a terrible confession to make. Now, before I say it… look, I have been singing for a long time. Since I was featured, at age three, as “Green Bell Stage Left” in my pre-school’s performance of Happy Christmas Bells. Maybe you heard about it. I have been in, and listened to, many, many choirs. So… here is the bad thing: I cannot stand the sound of singing children. I KNOW.

I’m not putting this right. What I really mean is choirs full of tweens. I love the sound of kids who have been trained in the English choral tradition, a lot. Bright, clear tones, well-trained voices, neck ruffs, folded hands. Love that. But, uh… I hate to say this, but most youth choirs do not sound like that. Most of them sound like reedy, airy, breathy, hooty, mezzo-piano-singing, treacly, listless um… children. I KNOW I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON. And I know they sound like that because they are young, please, I know. I was once one of them! I probably sounded like that (no, I didn’t). Seriously, I’m evil. I can’t believe I am even admitting this on the Internet for people to read. But, every time I am at a mall or something and there are a bunch of kids singing, I steer clear. I want to shove their director aside and yell at them to take deeper breaths and like, speak UP. Sing OUT. I know you’re only in ninth grade, but I shouldn’t be able to hear one electric keyboard over 35 of you! In fact, this poor lady that I have just pushed into the pile of fake snow, cowering behind the reindeer in her holiday vest, who went to Herculean effort to coordinate the carpool to get you to this mall, hates you just as much as I do. You’re KIDS. You are SO LOUD all the other times you’re awake! Make a dang joyful noise!

Evil. I’m admitting it! I have several friends who conduct choirs of young people, and they are all excellent — but that’s because those friends are like me. They like to use their ears to hear sound, not the heavy breathing of adolescents. I’m telling you this in case you have children who like to sing. Don’t let them get caught up with a bad choir director. It is a waste of time. There’s a lot of very helpful stuff to be learned from a good one — discipline, musicianship, fear — and zero to be learned from a bad one.

All of this is but a prelude that has nothing to do with the revelation of my least favorite Christmas carol: “The First Noel.” I’m sorry. I just hate it. And, it’s sad that I do, because it is a totally fine carol/hymn that I once loved. Chris and I were married nearly nine years ago (!!) on December 14, and my bridesmaids walked down the aisle to it! But, wow, I am totally sick of singing it and never need to even hear the melody again. Something about how the intervals jump or how it’s so endlessly long. I hate the way it goes “The-e  AIN-gels did saaaaay/was to CER-tain poor shepherds/in FIELDS as they laaaaay.” The thing always sounds like it’s being sung on a boat tossed at sea. Am I The Grinch? YES.

You don’t know this, I hope, because you have probably never sung for anyone so sadistic to make you slog through all the verses, but please rise and join me in singing the very last:

If we in our time shall do well,
We shall be free from death and hell; (Sounds good to me!)
For God hath prepared for us all
A resting place in general. (Oh. Thanks?)

Heeee. “In general.” Now, admittedly, the text of nearly the whole song is just as tortured, but I love to think of some poor congregation on Christmas Eve, facing a tired ride home in the freezing night, finally, finally getting to that last verse and, as their voices raise on the last word, confusedly looking at each other like, “In general? Did I fall asleep at some point?”

To be fair, the song does, in a previous verse, also feature several lines that I love:

And by the light of that same star
Three Wise Men came from country far;
To seek for a King was their intent,
And to follow the star wherever it went.

I love that. They intended to follow the star wherever it went. That’s faith! But, man, I cannot get down with that melody, no matter how hard I try. It just repeats too many times. In an attempt to resolve my feelings on the song, I did some immersion therapy, listening to every version on YouTube that I could stand (except those performed by junior high choirs, obviously), hoping to find one that made me love it again. That did not happen. But, this did:

(Sometimes I fear that America is ruining the rest of the world, and then I see something like that and know it is true.) Now, of course, I will never listen to it again the same way. If you don’t make it to the end, you will be missing out. I think at one point they say “Holy Snowman! NOEL NOEL NOEL!” with the passion that can only be mustered (in general) by the young.

Man, the Millionaires are busy. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re just busy, and sadly it seems like we’re busy with everything but making music with each other. We’ll get back to where we once belonged, fret not. We always do. Until then, as we approach the holidays, I thought I’d fill the space by talking a little Christmas music as we get ready to make the season bright. Yes, I do know that it’s not yet Thanksgiving. I hear you, and I love each and every one of you, but I don’t think they’re ever going to pass that law that says Target can’t start playing Here Comes Santa Claus until Nov. 25. We must embrace that fact, we simply must, and stop cluttering our Facebook feeds with hopes that it will ever be any different. Christmas, as the song goes, is coming.

I have a lot of holiday music stories. A lot. Once, my friend Leslie Poss and I were trapped on stage wearing Rudolph noses, singing some very serious and reverent music when her nose popped off and fell into my score. I nearly died that night, laugh-stifling myself until I almost broke a rib. This is a very busy time for many musicians, and I have been a part of so many bizarre (and beautiful) on-stage moments to honor the birth of our Lord that I could write a memoir on this subject alone. And that memoir would be titled, Jesus: Not This Again. No, no. Just kidding. I may have a love/hate relationship with Christmas music, but at the heart is love.

I have mentioned that I sing with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus, an honor and a privilege and something that, when I am not being too cynical about all the time it requires, I am still so amazed to be doing, considering the admiration I have had for this particular choir – an admiration shared by music lovers the world over – for most of my life. 

Last week was the first rehearsal for our annual Christmas concerts. We do basically the same set of music every year, with a few things rotating in and out. This roster of songs was programmed nine zillion years ago by Robert Shaw (the conductor, not the incredibly drunk-but-great actor from Jaws), and in tribute to his legacy, it remains an Atlanta institution. (The symphony actually puts on a whole slate of holiday shows, but this one is the most “traditional,” I guess you’d call it, with various favorites and hymns and assorted Lexus-commercial classics and your basic angels and shepherds abiding in fields, etc.)

Anyway, one of the highlights is “Bogoroditse Devo” a Rachmaninoff piece – translated as “Rejoice, O Virgin” (Ave Maria). It is a selection from his All-Night Vigil – possibly the most gorgeous major choral work ever written, ever, hands down, EVER. Now, I hear you. Y’all are like, “Hold up. Where’s the tra-la-la and mistletoe? Al, that ain’t Christmas music,” but oh, friends, it is. I appreciate a snappy jingle bell, myself, but we’ll get to those later… perhaps when I tell you about the time I festively jingled my bells at the grand opening of Birmingham’s Highway 31 Chick-Fil-A.

I’m not Catholic or, obviously, Russian Orthodox, but… actually, some part of me really is, and I can’t help it. Whenever I think of the story of Mary, particularly, some ancestor of mine boils up in my blood and I feel it on a deep level. From a storytelling perspective, Mary stands in for us all at Christmas. She represents every possible way a person can be “overwhelmed” – by responsibilities, by circumstances, with love, with gratitude. When my friend Joanne was having an overwhelmed moment after the birth of her first child, wondering just what in THE hell she had gotten herself into, her devout mom solemnly counseled her to “Think of the Blessed Mother, Joanne.”

Hearing this story made me laugh harder than I have ever laughed in my life, but dang, really – y’all just think of her for a second (and think of Joanne, too, who just had her fourth child a month ago and, none of the four being the Son of God, does not have it easy at the moment).  If any regular ol’ human being deserves hymns of adoration, surely it’s Mary, all gracefully handling her business at what you might call a stressful moment in history. If you are a religious person of whatever persuasion, are there many better reminders that God is with you than the image of Mary in the ridiculous circumstances in which she became a parent? Giving birth on a bale of hay, surrounded by barn animals and strangers that just wandered up to stand around watching? It’s a lot. You would need a whole host of angels reminding you to rejoice, too.

Garden-variety Protestants don’t do enough to acknowledge Mary. That bone we throw her once a year with a one-off mention in “Silent Night” doesn’t really cut it, let’s be honest. This beautiful piece, which I heard for the first time when I was in high school on a recording by – guess who? – Robert Shaw, has entranced me for well more than two decades. I practically learned the Russian phonetically from repeated listening years before I ever performed it.  Here it is. (Mr. Shaw was really getting into it, obviously. This recording is a full 30 seconds longer than most other choirs have done it – way slower than our current director conducts it — and I have read several reviews on YouTube and the like that he was too indulgent with the tempo. I’m sure he just wanted it to last as long as possible.  I can’t recommend strongly enough that you listen through headphones. The quiet parts are very quiet.) 

 
Every time we sing it feels like an avalanche of emotion. I think of myself the first time I heard it, and how much I felt even then like my life as a musician was part of a destiny written for me by a much higher power, and I am humbled and grateful, again, to have this overwhelming life.

Y’all, it’s not a good time for me. I haven’t written about this sort of thing on the Internet in a long time — blogs have changed, a lot of the motivation for reading blogs has changed, and I just don’t have the same sense of community around sharing personal things with an audience the way I once did. But… I’m not feeling so good. There are a lot of pressures on our lives right now, as there are in every household and family, and it has been a long, very very very hot summer full of a variety of irritations.  I think the whole country is feeling it, and while it is embarrassing to talk about it in the First World Problems sense, the summer has just been hard for me. Every minute I spend with Chris and MLH is a joy — that is no joke. I have a wonderful family and I laugh every day, and of course I have awesome friends for which I am so grateful. But, at the same time, I feel like I have an anvil on my shoulders, like I’m being pressed down into the sand.

In the context of songwriting, then, this should be a GREAT period of creativity! I usually can’t stop writing when I’m a little down. If there is such a thing as a muse, mine is an ornery barmaid at a condemned Texas roadhouse. This is the way it is for many, many songwriters. I have read countless interiews with people who say they cannot write when things are going well. In that case, I should have a double-album’s worth of songs sitting here. I feel like the motivation is there… somewhere, but I can’t get a hold of it.

I swear, more than half of it has been the heat. The weather has been downright unChristian for months on end. I had to all but abandon the rose bushes in my yard, watering them from the doorway as fast as I could but otherwise ignoring them. Those poor plants are the barely-living metaphors for my creative life right now. They’re  hanging on, but they are in rough shape and looking really seedy.

Like those roses, I am just physically Not Right. I have been facing some hard truths this summer about my health and the way I look and the way other people see those things and what it all means, and… frankly, it has sucked and caused my heart to shrink three sizes on more than one occasion.

So, with the arrival of fall and, praise our Heavenly Lord, of college football, and that New School Year feeling of change, the urge to get back on the wagon increases every day. How I’ll do that, I don’t know, but I have been spending a lot of time listening to music, searching around blindly for inspiration, backwards and forwards through the Spotify catalogue. Is there any stronger indication that I maybe need to seek professional help than the tracks of my tears over a DeBarge song?

No, for real. Driving up I-85 and I’m sitting there listening to this, misting up, thinking about an episode of Unsung I saw on DeBarge and how their lives were/are really difficult, but blah blah blah the purity of El DeBarge’s falsetto? I am laughing as I type this, but that happened. I so obviously need to make some changes, I see that. Where they align with my musical life, I’ll try to share them.

I’ve been thinking about albums a lot lately.  I talked about this a bit a few months ago when I went on a vinyl buying spree.  It’s popped into my head again since signing up for Spotify recently—don’t get me started on how much I am in love with it.  Seriously, you need to get it NOW. GO.  NOW!

I have access to pretty much everything I ever had or want to have.  It’s intoxicating.  I’ve been giddy for weeks.  I started making all sorts of playlists—favorite songs, divided by genres and decades and so forth.  That got out of control pretty quickly, so I went in search of albums.  I have gone pretty deep down the wormhole, mainly because the “Related Artists” function has reminded me of a whole pickle barrel full of music I used to have but forgot about.  When you have 100s of albums, CDs and cassettes, and then your house burns down, your memory of what you had fades pretty fast.  In my PTSD haze after the fire I actually tried to make a list and got to about 50 albums before quitting.

Now, I have access to all that stuff again and its helped me remember something—albums, in general, kind of suck.  Really, as a return on your investment they are usually a bad purchase.  Thousands upon thousands of albums are released each year—many of them are just bad from start to finish.  If you can find an album with three good-to-great songs you are doing well.  It’s rare to find an album that is solid all the way through.  Even really, really great albums have a filler song or two.

Of course, a lot of what makes an entire album listenable from start to finish is subjective.  I think most people would say their favorite albums spoke to them at a moment when they were ready to hear them.  It’s part of the reason those “Best Of” list are so totally useless.  Quantifying and objectifying a subjective experience is dumb.  I read enough of those lists to realize they are about a lot of other things besides music quality.

Which led me to an idea—I would go find a few albums I listened to start to finish, and loved, but forgot about post-fire.  See if they still spoke to me.  Let us begin with…

Styx – Paradise Theatre (1981)

I know. Let’s get it out of the way—Styx is pretty bad most of the time.  But not all of time.  Before I fell in love with REM, The Smiths, and Suicidal Tendencies, I was at the mercy of straight-ahead radio-friendly rock.  Styx grabbed my attention.  How could they not?  It was a band of Southerners and Midwesterners trying to rock it hard while at the mercy of a lead singer and songwriter who wanted to be the next Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Damn you, Dennis DeYoung!  Before the crappy concept album that gave us “Mr. Roboto” we got this album.  As best I can explain it’s a concept album about the decline of urban life in 1970s America, and the increasing sense of isolation and personal angst created by feeling alone in a city of millions. These ideas are explored through the shuttering of a once popular theater:  The Paradise.  It’s a half-baked idea at best but I was 12 when it came out so what did I know?

I’m fairly certain I purchased this at the Peaches in Cherry Hill, but that is a foggy memory.  I remember a Peaches—was it in Cherry Hill?  Jersey people, help me out here.  They used to sell wooden crates with the Peaches logo slapped across both ends to hold your albums.  The chain closed sometime in the mid-1980s but for years after you could find used albums with a big old Peaches sticker on them in stores across South Jersey.

Anyway, I listened to this album all the time for six months or so.  I have fond recollections of the big hit from the album The Best of Times. A rock ballad of epic proportions.  My family went camping in the 1980s and one campground we went to regularly had a dance on Saturday nights with a DJ.  This song was huge at the exact moment I discovered that I wanted to slow dance with girls.  And this is the song we danced to.  Then we would go off to a dark spot in the woods and hit the bases, if you feel me.  So obviously, I gotta give it up for The Best of Times.

The rest of the album is surprisingly not that bad.  It came out before the 80s really ruined bands that musically had the goods to rock when they wanted to, so the disc contains some good riffs.  “Rockin’ the Paradise” still has a nice punch, despite some really bad lyrics, including DeYoung telling us to “futurize our attitude.”  Geez. I also remember the video for this song.  For some reason the drummer ( who has since passed away) wore a sailor suit with short pants that made it appear as if he desperately wanted to get cast on The Love Boat.

DUDES. The 80s. When bands were full of old guys who looked like regular people. It was a different time. The songs that try the hardest to work the concept have not held up well, “Lonely People” and “Half Penny Too Penny,” for example. But I will still very gladly listen to “Too Much Time on my Hands,” the other big hit off the album.

Do I still love this album?  Will I make Al endure Paradise Theatre in its entirety during our next road trip?  Nah.  But I might slide one or two songs on to my “Great Stadium Rock Bands” playlist.  Oh, I’m making one. Thinking about this, I’m pretty happy that I’m futurizing my attitude regarding how I access music. Al still clings to the album, and looks at me like I’m having a midlife crisis whenever I talk about this, like she doesn’t even know me anymore. I get that. I’m a historian and I like old stuff, so maybe it seems weird. I’m not dismissing albums altogether  – when you do happen across a great one, it can become a lifelong treasure. We’ll talk about that, later. Right now, I’m futurizing.  

Next Time… The Housemartins, Hull 4. London 0.