Well, this is it. Day 365. I will not be recording a song tomorrow.
I have lots of things to say about this project, and the journey I’ve been on this year exploring these songs, my memories of them, the data about them, and maybe remixing or rerecording some for sure, but for now, I am excited to be done.
This song is one of two time-honored traditional New Year’s Eve songs I learned from my wife’s family. (The other song is Cinco Pa’ Las Doce.) This one is not Venezuelan — the original songwriter and singer is Colombian; Tony Camargo, who recorded the most popular version (and the one I’m familiar with) is from Mexico — but it seems to be popular everywhere.
The words to the song — and there are not that many, come down to this:
I won’t forget the old year, because it brought me very good things: a goat, a black donkey, a white mare, and a good mother-in-law.
As we have previously established, I am decidedly not punk rock, so this song is the Ramones song I know best. Seemed like the obvious choice for Dec. 30, though, depending on when you start and stop counting, etc.
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Listen for the dog barking, but she fell back asleep, perhaps lulled by the dulcet tones? The electric guitar was actually too quiet – most of what you’re hearing is a separate track with the acoustic playing rhythm, using Garageband effects for distortion.
I’ve been working on this song for the better part of 25 years! I remember looking up the chords for the first time, in the dial-up years, in my New York apartment, learning the bits of it and trying to keep bringing it back from memory often. I put it on the list for this project early on, and doing But Not For Me a while back gave me a lot of confidence to just try it today. Full send.
I will not attempt to do my relationship with John Coltrane’s music justice here, but it should be enough to say that at times it has been religious for me. It has appeared in a film school project that I am particularly proud of (in that it was completed, and was, absolutely, entirely mine.) I’ve had the Blue Train poster on my bedroom wall, and the Love Supreme cover hung in offices. I’ve read and forgotten at least two Coltrane biographies, and I’ve bought reissues and remasters and probably, between CDs and vinyl and appearances on Miles and Monk records, own more of John Coltrane’s music than anyone else’s.
Naima in particular stands out in my mind as an unmatched piece of melody and complexity. Imagine the pressure, when you are Literally John Coltrane at arguably the peak of your powers, authoring what would become Giant Steps, writing a song for literally your wife. Who you would go on to split up with, and marry a piano player, who also played harp, named Alice, and I’m not sure there’s a matching number called “Alice,” because by then Coltrane was floating in outer space, musically, and honestly, Alice’s records for the next few years are better than the last couple years of Coltrane’s music, after A Love Supreme, at least.
Enough about Coltrane.
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It’s an instrumental, near the end, and the last day I woke up not knowing what I was going to play, and the first day in a long time I knew the number of the day without looking it up.
Two hair metal-adjacent bands in a row? OK, yes. That happened. Not every song can be Wilco or Dylan or The Band or Fleet Foxes, though many of these songs have been those songs.
This song is indeed another cassingle-grade issue from the late 1980s, if I recall correctly. It’s fun, and I’ve always liked it, and Last Christmas reminded me of it.
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I didn’t get all the piano parts, but I did some on the second guitar (acoustic with Garageband effects, because it’s late for electric, and the dog is not a fan, and she is calm tonight.
I am, again, exhausted, and it is puppy-related. It turns out recording multi-track songs requiring the patience of a puppy to sit still in a windowless office for an hour or so at a time is… not a thing? Good thing we’re on vacation and my only job right now is to train and entertain this dog. 😉
I’m not tired enough to not do More Than Words with no rehearsal, not tuning down for it, and in approximately 1.2 takes, though.
You’ve probably heard this song! Many times! I owned the cassingle, I’m pretty sure, before Hole Hearted also dropped, and at that I point I think I bought the… [checks release dates] CD? I think I might’ve had a CD of this. The rest of it was kinda metal. But not that metal. I think? Or am I thinking of Queensryche? Ooh, I could do that song… but the year is winding down quickly. We’re almost done here.
Reader, I did not intentionally take Boxing Day off from this project. Rather, I spent a good hour or two on a longer project, was happily interrupted by a Spider Man movie, a dog park, takeout dinner, and after those three events, I was dead tired, and drawn into playing videogames with both my kids on their new Nintendo, literally a dream come true for all involved, and then, I am not making this up, some of us watched some of a Little Prince movie.
I slept well.
I didn’t even remember that I had slacked off on day 360 until I walked the dog this morning, and found myself quietly humming this song, which I had on my Christmas music list (I mean, sort of, right?), and realized I had better go and sing it real quick. I think this is the third Palace song I’ve done off the Hope EP? If I had a few more days, I would finish the rest.
This is the second time I have been late in 360 days, which seems not bad at all.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over), by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
I sang this song late in the long run of my childhood Christmas Day celebrations, which were always at the home of the couple who became best friends with my parents before I was born. Their teenagers were my babysitters, and the ones who taught me about Duran Duran, and the importance of a Barbi dreamhouse, and of above-ground swimming pools, briefly. They lived over our back fence diagonally, and with as much time as we spent in our yards those days, and as much time as we spent at each other’s houses, especially our annual drive around the block for Christmas, it seemed like they were family.
Our singalongs evolved into talent shows, and the group of families that got together on Christmas Day included some ringers (not me) who you may have seen on stage or screen at various moments in the 1990s or later.
The year I sang this, I must’ve been an angry teenager, and/or the (first) Gulf War might’ve been looming, or long over, idk. I remember singing it, doing some sort of serviceable job. I wonder now if I played the Bm or if I transposed the whole song to avoid it? Who knows.
Niño Lindo, a Venezuelan traditional aguinaldo, a Christmas carol.
When my wife’s family lived in Venezuela, we spent every Christmas there, and I had the joy of celebrating with hallacas, aguinaldos, pan de jamón, and lots of other traditions. The first Venezuelan Christmas music I heard, including this song, was probably Morella Muñoz y Quinteto Contrapunto, who continue to amaze me, most likely at my wife’s Italian grandmother’s apartment, while we made hallacas the first Christmas I spent there, which turned out to be in the middle of a general strike, and trouble at the not-yet-nationalized oil company. It was a fun trip. We always mixed languages and cultures, with Italian and Spanish — well, mostly Sicily and the Canary Islands — taking senior roles, while Venezuela made up the balance, and the occasional surprise latkes when holidays overlapped.
Going to mass in Venezuela, by default, is a thing. We went to a larger church at times, on Sundays and Christmas Eve, but for a couple years right after we got married, my in-laws attended a smaller, neighborhood church, where I heard and danced and sang aguinaldos at the crack of dawn for days leading up to Christmas Eve, midnight mass. I know we all have “It’s not Christmas until…” boxes we like to check, and “It’s not Christmas until we sing Niño Lindo at midnight mass on Nochebuena” was my thing in those years.
I first heard this song in the DVD-era revival of Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Family Christmas, which I had never seen as a child, and loved it dearly. It showed up again on our John Denver / Muppets Christmas CD, which comes from a totally different 1979 television show, which you could watch or not watch (the 1987 Muppets / Sesame / Fraggle mashup show is much, much funnier), but the songs are heartwarming and hilarious at times, of course.
Needless to say, Emmet Otter is not the author of the song, and neither is John Denver, but rather, it’s by Paul Williams. Thanks to our friendly neighborhood Wikipedia page, I have also just learned that Paul Williams is the songwriter behind Rainbow Connection itself, several 1970s pop hit ballads, including “We’ve Only Just Begun,” by the Carpenters, which kinda slaps in its way, and, get this, plays a small role in Smokey and the Bandit, earning him immense street credit on my childhood block.
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I am playing this in E, as John Denver does in the 1979 show’s soundtrack.
And on the 356th day of the year, we return to this song, which kicked off this whole project when my wife gave me a ring light last Christmas, and the first thing I could think to try it out was a short recording of Blue Christmas. I posted a bit of it to my Instagram story, and a few of you liked it, I guess?
When I decided to do some pandemic content, a song a day made sense. I considered Insta, but didn’t want to give Zuck all that content for free. Instead, I’ve done most of this project using WordPress (and in fact, WordPress.com, with a premium plan that allows for lots of video hosting), except for a handful of songs posted from vacations and other locations that were just plain easier to upload to YouTube and embed here.
I have some ideas of what to do on Jan. 1 and after with alllllll thissss contenttttttt but also I will probably not do a “thing every day” in 2022, unless it’s, like, a picture of the new dog every day, which could be amusing as she grows, but also I will do something close to that anyway, and idk if I have the stamina to be a “dog content” person.