A Christmas playlist full of non-traditional holiday songs

Do you have a favorite song this time of year? 

For some, songs like Judy Garland's “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is at the top of the holiday music list. But, Jason Patrick Woodbury joined The Show to share a Christmas playlist that's a little less traditional.

Woodbury is a longtime fixture in the Arizona music scene. Today, he’s creative director at Hello Merch and host of two music podcasts, WASTOIDS and Transmissions, for the online music magazine Aquarium Drunkard, and he’s a musician himself.

He brought us a Christmas playlist full of songs you probably haven't heard a million times already this year — at least not in these forms.

Full conversation

JASON WOODBURY: I like Christmas, like I genuinely do. I think it's a very it's a very sweet time of year, and it's a very special time, if you let it be. And of course, there are a million crazy things happening in the world that make it feel, you know, not Christmasy, or you might even feel guilty for indulging the coziness of the season.

But no, I do like it, and I like Christmas music because I think Christmas music at its heart is like, often, just very well-written music. There's a certain kind of classic form that you aspire to. But I also think that Christmas is a holiday that has space for a lot of different emotional feelings. And so I like music that I like sad Christmas music, you know, and sweet Christmas music and fun Christmas music, but also a little out there Christmas but, yeah, I think Christmas music is it gets a bad rap, and it gets a little overplayed, I'm sure, but that's why we we tried to find some some songs that maybe you haven't heard a million times.

LAUREN GILGER: Right! OK, but I mean, some of these are covers, like almost all of Christmas music is, but not the first one on your list. Tell us about this one, this is by The Free Design.

WOODBURY: Yeah, so The Free Design was a family vocal group from Delavan, New York, and they recorded in the late '60s and early '70s, and they had this kind of jazzy sound that record collectors call sunshine pop. So as you can imagine, sunshine pop lends itself well to Christmas. This is from a 1968 single that they put out. It has another Christmas song on the B side. “Christmas is the Day," and that one's OK, but, but this one, “Close Your Mouth (It’s Christmas),” it's really good.

What I like about it is really that it's kind of an anti-consumerist song. It's like a song about locating something about the season that runs a little deeper than just your shopping list. And I feel like, I feel like, that's really nice. There's this line in it where one of the singers sings, “get to know the people in your house, you might like them," and you might like them. It's you know, who knows.

But it's sweet and it's funny and it's kind of a cutesy song, but I also think that it's a reminder that if you go into things with the right spirit, you might actually end up seeing the good in people, because it's there some most the time, at least if you, if you look close enough.

Brandon Michel

GILGER: Most of the time, most of the time, there's no more Christmasy message than that.

WOODBURY: Yeah, exactly.

GILGER: OK, so let's move on to something a little different. This is by Jesse May Hemphill, “Merry Christmas Pretty Baby,” a song we know, but this does not sound like a regular kind of cover of a Christmas song.

WOODBURY: No, and this is one that I think I probably heard on KJZZ’s Those Low Down Blues with Bob Corritore, Sunday evening, listening forever, right? Bob's been doing that for as long as I have been alive, I believe, literally. And yeah, I think this is one that I heard, and it just got stuck in my head.

Jesse May Hemphill is a singer who came up in the north Mississippi blues scene, and they have like this really fertile ground there, where all sorts of blues icons have emerged from that territory, including her grandfather, Syd Hemphill, who was recorded on a bunch of Alan Lomax recordings. But what I love about this one is that Jesse is playing it all. It's a one-woman band, so she sings, plays guitar and hits a tambourine, then she doubled back and added snare and bass.

But you know, for me, so much Christmas music ends up being very well mannered and very on the nose. I think what I like about what Jesse does with this song is that it's full of imperfections and ragged edges, and it ends up just creating this sort of hypnotic but very, very human feel. And I think it sounds especially good after a few strong glasses of eggnog.

GILGER: Which I hope we’ll all be having soon. OK, so this next song is by a band we all probably know, My Morning Jacket, Jim James right, “Our World.”

WOODBURY: Well so I've been listening to My Morning Jacket forever 20 years even. I think I was reflecting on it and realized that I got their 2003 album, “It Still Moves," for Christmas that year.

GILGER: Full circle over there.

WOODBURY: Thanks dad, but yeah, they're from Louisville, Kentucky, and they're led by Jim James. But this is a cover. It's written by the great songwriter Paul Williams, and it's one of the songs that's featured in one of my everybody has, like the Christmas movies they have to watch every year. Yeah, for me, “Emmet Otters Jug-Band Christmas,” the Jim Henson.

GILGER: I've never even heard of this.

WOODBURY: You don't know Emmett Otter? OK, get ready. You're about to lose it, because it is so, so good. It's the perfect blend of sweet and melancholy and warm and goofy, and it's really incredible. And of course, it's all these beautiful little Muppets.

GILGER: It’s the Muppets.

WOODBURY: It's these little Muppets. It's characters who are mostly, mostly just in this movie. But I think Kermit the Frog does show up in the very beginning.

GILGER: He's on the cover for this song, yeah.

WOODBURY: Yeah exactly, and well, this came from this cool comp where a bunch of people covered Muppets associated songs. So it's kind of weird. It might not necessarily scan as a Christmas song lyrically, but because it's featured in that movie, which is just so good, it's a story, I think, a movie about these characters that put others before themselves. And I think Jim James really gets to that with this song and sings these really beautiful lines about how the world feels too small, but there's room for everybody. I think that it’s a maybe slightly countercultural Christmas message that I think we could all take to heart.

GILGER: Yeah, that’s lovely. OK, so the next song on the list is "Frosty the Snowman," which we all know, obviously, but this does not sound like the "Frosty the Snowman" you probably think of.

WOODBURY: Probably not, this is the Cocteau Twins. Are goths allowed to do Christmas? That’s the question I had.

GILGER: You know, everyone’s allowed to do Christmas. 

WOODBURY: Well, if so, I think the Cocteau Twins bring the yuletide spirit to their kind of gothy sensibility. But yeah, Cocteau Twins are this Scottish dream pop trio comprising Robin Guthrie, Simon Raymond and Elizabeth Frazier, and she's one of my favorite singers of all time. So often, the Cocteau Twins don't really sing in what we would categorize as English, but they're not singing in any other language either. It's just sort of gibberish, you know, sort of a, I don't know, a kind of secular glossolalia, which is the term for when you're speaking in tongues or whatever. So she's often draped in all sorts of effects.

But on this one, she is singing the traditional Frosty the Snowman lyrics. But when you hear him put in this context, this sort of post-punk context, you realize the Frosty story is weird. It's like kind of a story. It's kind of a it's, if it's not a full on ghost story, there's still something supernatural. This inanimate object comes, comes to life. But you know, traditionally, Christmas Eve is sort of a traditionally a time where people would tell ghost stories.

GILGER: Yeah, you hear references to that in old Christmas songs.

WOODBURY: Yeah, exactly and I think we've gotten away from that tradition, but hopefully listening to stuff like the Cocteau Twins do "Frosty the Snowman" can help put us back in the slightly more somber and maybe even a little spooky Christmas Eve zone.

GILGER: Nice. OK, and we're gonna end with a duo here, a double entry, as you say. This is two different versions of one of the great kind of all time Christmas songs, I think, which is "Charlie Brown Christmas," Christmas time is here.

WOODBURY: Yeah. I mean, this is as good as it gets. As far as I'm concerned, I listen to the "Charlie Brown Christmas" soundtrack an awful lot around this time of year, and these are two very different versions of it. The first is by this Texas trio, Krumben, who are just really great. They kind of do psychedelic global music, where it's part surf, part Latin vibe, part lo fi hip hop. And they just have this really cool thing.

This would be like if Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown went to Coachella, like that. This might be how it sounds. It's a very, very down tempo, very groovy, very laid back. And that melody impossible to beat, and that's why I really like this other version. It's a little more obscure. I don't even know if it's on all of the streaming services.

GILGER: I looked on Spotify for this, and this was the only one I could not find.

WOODBURY: So you can find it if you track down a website called Bandcamp. Oh, yeah, that's an indie friendly sort of platform for artists. But yeah, this guy, JR Bohannon, who is a pedal steel player from New York, and his version is very, very bittersweet. I mean, the pedal steel is such an evocative sounding instrument. I'm really, I love the way it renders melodies kind of woozy and a little bit out and so this version really accentuates all of that stuff.

It's a reminder that as much as we love the Christmas season, there is something a little sad about it, you know, and a little bit, you know, melancholy in the way that we mark time and we mark those who are, you know, gone or aren't with us anymore. So I think that if you're the kind of person who can handle a little bittersweet. It's like a smile, but with a little sadness in your eyes. That's the sense that I get from this one, and so I really love this one.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The story has been updated to correct the spelling of the WASTOIDS podcast.