Trees Don't Cry (post title credit: The Divine Comedy)
Total tree-hugger here. I live in the woods, next to a redwood fairy ring. I've also chopped down and trimmed a blue spruce in the Catskills, paid too much for a Charlie Brown tree on Broadway streetcorners, ridden pitbull around San Francisco collecting castoff trees for Ocean Beach bonfires, and for several years had an aluminum tree drenched in vintage ornaments poached from the dump. I bought the tree pictured above in downtown Hollywood one dark season and had it flocked pink to fulfill a longtime fantasy.
Christmas is weird. Here are songs about Christmas trees.
Saintseneca is among the best 21st Century Alt.Xmas heroes, and last year's song cuts into the heart of today's theme.
Bluesman/bootlegger Charley Jordan and Verdi Lee (aka Xmas Blues veteran Mary Harris), inspiring Lady Gaga back in 1935.
Stephin Merritt is my generation's Sondheim, Cole Porter, and Kurt Weill in one, delivering succinct perfection in each lyric. From 2010:
"O Tannenbaum" is unjustly underrepresented in the shopping-mall canon, and I owe it to the indefatigable Ernie, not Bert (one of the earliest and most prolific sharers of out-of-print Christmas music) for this 1961 adaptation of the evergreen ode to lit-up trees.
In 2014, Kurt Feldman clarified the axe-edge joy of our Christmas tradition.
Raymond Scott was the daddy of library music, but keep this pre-War comfort food from 1940 in your back pocket for the old-timers.
Way back in the New Gay Nineties, we used to go see Y'ALL play in the East Village, and it was everything. From 1995.
You're only allowed to watch the following if you're in a band (Crying Day Care Choir or Christmas Aguilera, ideally) that's hip enough to reimagine this cringe-corny song from 1969, written by John Barry, sung by Nina, Baroness van Pallandt, and featuring Dame Diana Rigg (and a one-off Bond). Sorry/not sorry. (Yes, the blonde skating up and smiling at 2:15 is Lady Olenna Tyrell.) [N.B. I wrote this post a few months before Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom scooped it.]
The Bewitched Hands manage to quote a mid-80s Eurythmics song on this great track from 2010.
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