Fairytale of New York (Song)

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    They’re Great Songs. Are They Christmas Songs?

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    Nine tracks from Barbra Streisand, the 1975, Fleet Foxes and more get put to the Lindsay Test.Barbra Streisand, another (unlikely) queen of Christmas.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressDear listeners,What makes a Christmas song … a Christmas song? Sleigh bells? Yuletide imagery? A certain indefinable, know-it-when-you-hear-it sense of reverence and good cheer?My personal standard might sound a bit humbuggy: To me, a true Christmas song is one that I would not want to hear any month other than December. Even a song as brilliant and beloved as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” loses some of its power in March or August. With all due respect to Mariah Carey, please wait until all the Thanksgiving leftovers have been consumed.But what about those cuspy, sort-of-Christmas songs? Well, at least they’re fun to argue about. “River” by Joni Mitchell — which begins with a melancholic piano interpolation of “Jingle Bells” — might be the quintessential example, and I believe with all my heart that it’s not a Christmas song, not only because it’s about feeling unable to get into the holiday mood, but also because it passes my test: I can, and do, listen to it during any and all months of the year. (Plus, it’s perfectly sequenced on “Blue,” which is definitely not a seasonal album.) The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” on the other hand? Also a song I love, but one that I am only in the mood for one-twelfth of the year.Some songs really do have it both ways, though: Christmas-appropriate, but also perennially listenable. For today’s playlist, I’ve picked nine tracks that I’m calling Questionable Christmas Songs.Some tell stories that happen to take place around the holidays (“If We Make It Through December,” “’Tis the Damn Season”) and others have simply experienced a gradual shift in public perception so that, for some reason, people now consider them seasonally appropriate (“Holiday Road,” “Hallelujah,” “My Favorite Things”). All of them might be Christmas songs, depending on whom you ask, but they also might not be because I will not get mad if I hear any of them in April. Consider it my early gift to you: something to apolitically argue about at the holiday dinner table.Also, speaking of Christmas songs: Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” officially hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100! If you read Friday’s Amplifier, you will understand how exciting this is — and you’ll be able to impress your friends by name-dropping a bunch of other great Brenda Lee songs. Congrats to Little Miss Dynamite!Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “If We Make It Through December”OK, this one might be a Christmas song because it appears on a Christmas album (“Merle Haggard’s Christmas Present”; please note the cover art), but Merle Haggard only decided to cut that album after the success of this stand-alone single — the biggest pop crossover hit of his entire career. There’s mention of gifts under the tree (or rather, a lack thereof), but the true subject of this melancholy tune is the plight of the down-and-out working man, meaning it is, first and foremost, a Merle Haggard song. (Listen on YouTube)2. Lindsey Buckingham: “Holiday Road”This delightful ditty was written for the 1983 film “National Lampoon’s Vacation” — not “Christmas Vacation.” But thanks to some version of the Mandela Effect, plus the fact that the word “holiday” is right there in the title, some confused people have started to insist that “Holiday Road” is a Christmas song. The country singer Chris Janson is vocal among them; he performed his cover of Lindsey Buckingham’s track on last year’s “Opry Country Christmas” broadcast, and he’s since released that cover with an extra festive lyric video. (Listen on YouTube)3. Fleet Foxes: “White Winter Hymnal”When a non-holiday song is suddenly reclassified in the cultural imagination as a holiday song, often, one must blame Pentatonix. On its popular holiday albums, the a cappella group has Christmas-ified such classics as “God Only Knows,” “Hallelujah” and, most recently and most puzzlingly, “Kiss From a Rose.” (We must resist this with all our might. We are not going to let Pentatonix convince us that “Kiss From a Rose” is a Christmas song.) The group’s version of this admittedly wintry 2008 Fleet Foxes tune appeared on “That’s Christmas to Me,” a 2014 Pentatonix album with an appropriately subjective title, but (can you tell?) I prefer the original. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Handsome Family: “So Much Wine”I have Phoebe Bridgers to thank for this one: It was her pick last year in her annual Christmas covers series. I’d never heard the original, and when I went back to check it out, I found that I actually preferred it to Bridgers’s more mournful rendition. Her version of this ballad of seasonal alcoholism is an out-and-out tear-jerker, but the Handsome Family manage to tell the same story with some dark comic relief. (Listen on YouTube)5. Taylor Swift: “’Tis the Damn Season”I believe it was my colleague Joe Coscarelli who, on an episode of Popcast, came up with one of my favorite Taylor Swift conspiracy theories: That “Evermore,” her second and decidedly more wintry 2020 album, was originally supposed to be a Christmas-themed release. This finely wrought ode to hometown what-ifs and temporarily rekindled romance is probably the strongest argument for that case. (Listen on YouTube)6. The 1975: “Wintering”Here’s another song about regressing at one’s parents’ house for a long weekend, a curiously season-specific track on the 1975’s excellent 2022 album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” I often appreciate the details in Matty Healy’s writing, and there are some particularly vivid ones here: a precocious, vegan sister; a fleece that doesn’t warm as well as advertised; a mother with a sore back who objects to being mentioned in the song. “I just came for the stuffing, not to argue about nothing,” Healy sings. “But mark my words, I’ll be home on the 23rd.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Barbra Streisand: “My Favorite Things”Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for the 1959 Broadway production “The Sound of Music,” “My Favorite Things” didn’t begin life as a holiday song. Julie Andrews performed it on a 1961 Christmas special, though, and since then its mentions of mittens, snowflakes and brown paper packages tied up with strings have made it sound at home on many a Christmas album — including Barbra Streisand’s. (Listen on YouTube)8. Leonard Cohen: “Hallelujah”Speaking of famous Jews singing are-they-really-Christmas songs, the endlessly over-covered, richly poetic, mordantly hilarious “Hallelujah” is in so many ways one of the most misunderstood songs in popular culture — so of course some people have turned it into a holiday standard. But as Stereogum’s Chris DeVille wrote in a 2019 essay, vehemently and correctly, “Whatever context it belongs in, Christmas ain’t it.” (Listen on YouTube)9. The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl: “Fairytale of New York”This is probably the only true Christmas song on the list, but it’s certainly an unconventional one — and of course I had to include it in honor of the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, who died last week. Over the weekend, Rob Tannenbaum (a journalist with a very appropriate name for this purpose) published a fascinating piece about the making of the song, and the push to send it to the top of the charts in the United Kingdom. Might “Fairytale” be the next Christmas song to belatedly hit No. 1? (Listen on YouTube)I get home on the 23rd,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“I’ll Have a Questionable Christmas” track listTrack 1: Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “If We Make It Through December”Track 2: Lindsey Buckingham, “Holiday Road”Track 3: Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal”Track 4: The Handsome Family, “So Much Wine”Track 5: Taylor Swift, “‘Tis the Damn Season”Track 6: The 1975, “Wintering”Track 7: Barbra Streisand, “My Favorite Things”Track 8: Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”Track 9: The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York” More

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      How Shane MacGowan Made ‘Fairytale of New York’

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      The duet between the Pogues frontman and the singer Kirsty MacColl portrays lovers who turn viciously against one another on Christmas Eve.The competition to have the No. 1 chart single on Christmas Day in the United Kingdom is rabid; victory is sweet. Since November 1987, when the Pogues released “Fairytale of New York,” it’s been a recurring, if improbable, contender for the crown, but has never finished higher than second. A 2023 victory seems likely; after the Pogues singer Shane MacGowan died on Thursday, the British gambling company Ladbrokes changed its odds from 5-4 to a safe bet 1-4.“Fairytale of New York” is a duet between MacGowan and the British singer Kirsty MacColl, portraying lovers who turn viciously against each other on Christmas Eve. It’s “a drunken hymn for people with broken dreams and abandoned hopes,” Roison O’Connor wrote in The Independent. There’s misery, despair, drugs, booze and the kind of angry, cutting insults and slurs that could only come after years of marriage.“It’s a song about the underdog, and that’s a very British thing,” Steve Lillywhite, who produced the track, said in a video interview from his home in Bali. “All the other Christmas records compete against each other, whereas with ‘Fairytale,’ the only competition is itself.”Fittingly, “Fairytale of New York” began with a bit of marital conflict. Jem Finer, a founding member of the Pogues who played banjo and other instruments, told Irish Music Daily in an undated interview that he had written a song about a sailor who starts getting tearful on Christmas Eve. He proudly played it for his wife, the multimedia artist Marcia Farquhar, who was “disparaging” about the lyrics, he recalled. “Her main point was that it was sentimental twaddle.”“I was a bit put out, to be honest,” Finer admitted. He challenged her to suggest a better Christmas Eve scenario, and she proposed an unhappy family. (Finer declined an interview request. “I’m rather lost for words at the moment,” he said via email.)Finer worked on the song and gave it to MacGowan, who wrote the lyrics as a duet for male and female voices. Cait O’Riordan, who played bass in the Pogues, recalled that MacGowan wanted to sing it as a duet with a female studio engineer. “Shane was courting her,” O’Riordan said in a March 2023 interview with the national Irish broadcasting company RTÉ.When that didn’t work, Finer suggested O’Riordan, who also struggled to interpret the song. “I was trying to sing it like Ethel Merman,” she said. O’Riordan left the band and married Elvis Costello, who had produced the Pogues’ 1985 breakthrough album, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash.”The group thought about enlisting Chrissie Hynde of Pretenders. Then it began working with Lillywhite, a British producer who had made his name working with XTC, Peter Gabriel and U2. Frank Murray, who managed the Pogues, also managed MacColl, who was married to Lillywhite. Murray suggested MacColl as the duet partner, and Lillywhite recorded her vocals one weekend in the couple’s home studio.MacColl mastered not only the song’s unusual phrasing, in which MacGowan sings so far behind the beat he’s almost left behind, but the lyrics’ mix of bittersweet resignation and rage. “It’s a very nuanced way of singing. I spent a long time getting every note and rhythm right, for it to swing,” Lillywhite said. “Kirsty is perfect on it.” (She died in 2000; a recent boxed set collects her work.)In the song’s piano-and-voice introduction, MacGowan has been nicked for drunkenness, and his elderly cellmate sings the traditional Irish tune “The Rare Old Mountain Dew,” one of two songs-within-the-song. MacGowan begins to reminisce about a woman, with a slurred sense of optimism: “Happy Christmas, I love you, baby.” Then MacColl enters, and the two reminisce about the joyful start of their relationship as Irish immigrants in New York City.In the next verse, there’s a jump cut to the miserable present as the couple exchange insults, with MacColl ultimately announcing, “Happy Christmas, your arse, I pray God it’s our last.” It’s a small sign of songwriting savvy that MacGowan made the woman’s invective stronger than the man’s.The use of a gay slur in that section went largely unnoticed in 1987, but more recently, a few of the song’s epithets have been bleeped out by some broadcasters. In a 2018 statement, MacGowan explained that the words he used were true to the identity of the characters. “She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person,” he said, adding that he had no objection to having the lyrics bleeped.Finer’s music matches the complexity of the lyrics by using suspended chords and a switch to a minor key in the chorus (“The boys of the N.Y.P.D. Choir were singing ‘Galway Bay’”) to create tension and unease. In the last verse, MacGowan gently tries to reconcile with his lover. “You really don’t know what is going to happen to them. The ending is completely open,” he told The Guardian in 2012.There have even been covers of “Fairytale of New York,” including one by Jon Bon Jovi (“Terrible,” Lillywhite groaned). This holiday season, the brothers Jason and Travis Kelce, both N.F.L. stars, released a version with changed lyrics, “Fairytale of Philadelphia.” “The song gets to the roots of love, anger, resentment, sacrifice and ultimately companionship. It lays out what relationships really are, that they are something bigger than yourself,” Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles wrote in an email.MacGowan’s renown as a songwriter extends far past “Fairytale of New York,” but it does sum up his and the Pogues’ distinct mix of Celtic traditionalism and punk attitude. “There’s such a wide spectrum of emotions, expertly conveyed,” Daragh Lynch of Lankum, a Pogues-influenced Irish folk group, said via email. “It is beautiful, brutal, full of despair and hope.” The song, he added, “is one of the finest examples of songwriting in existence and will quite likely never be equaled.” More

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      Shane MacGowan, Pogues Songwriter Who Fused Punk and Irish Rebellion, Dies at 65

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      As frontman for the Pogues, he delivered lyrics romanticizing whiskey-soaked ramblers and hard-luck stories of emigration, while providing a musical touchstone for members of the Irish diaspora worldwide.Shane MacGowan, the brilliant but chaotic former songwriter and frontman for the Pogues, who reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock has died. He was 65.Mr. MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, announced his death on Instagram. She did not provide additional details.Mr. MacGowan emerged from London’s punk scene of the late 1970s and spent nine tumultuous years with the initial incarnation of the Pogues. Rising from North London pubs, the band was performing in stadiums by the late 1980s, before Mr. MacGowan’s addictions and mental and physical deterioration forced the band to fire him. He later founded Shane MacGowan & the Popes, with whom he recorded and toured in the 1990s.Along the way, Mr. MacGowan earned twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish emigrant life. His best-known are the opening lines of his biggest hit, an alcoholics’ lament-turned-unlikely Christmas classic titled “Fairytale of New York.”It was Christmas Eve babeIn the drunk tankAn old man said to me, won’t see another one“I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography “A Furious Devotion,” which was published in 2021. “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”A full obituary will be published shortly. More