Haggard, Merle

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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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      Listen to the Mother of All Playlists

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      Hear songs by Brandi Carlile, 2Pac, Merle Haggard and more for Mother’s Day.Brandi Carlile’s “The Mother” is one of the more honest songs about motherhood in the canon.Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York TimesDear listeners,A lot of music about motherhood gets a bad rap.Given how much our culture devalues women’s work — and domestic work most of all — this shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but it’s still a bummer. That nebulously defined genre of dad rock has, over the years, earned a begrudging cultural respect, but the phrase “mom rock,” in the rare instances it’s used, still sounds like an insult.I remember discussing this double standard a few years ago when I was interviewing the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, who won a Tony for her score for the hit musical “Hadestown” and releases incisively observed folk music under her own name. Becoming a mother had ushered in a drastic change in her perspective — “a relocation of myself in the world and in my family,” in her words. She wanted to be able to write about that experience with all the richness and depth it deserved, even if it ran the risk of being labeled, as she put it with a laugh, “culturally irrelevant mom art.”Luckily, plenty of other songwriters have charted the choppy waters of motherhood — and of being mothered — proving it to be one of the most complicated, challenging and (at least sometimes) rewarding of human experiences. In honor of Mother’s Day (don’t forget: this Sunday!), I’ve put together a playlist of songs that reflect motherhood in all of its unruly complexity.But at the same time: not too unruly, on this day of celebrating moms. There is a time and a place for Danzig’s “Mother,” but it is neither now nor here on this playlist. Ditto John Lennon’s primal scream of “Mother,” though the Beatles’ “Julia” might have been a more appropriate choice. I would here like to acknowledge the existence of the Spice Girls’ “Mama” and Good Charlotte’s “Thank You Mom” without asking you to listen to them.The aforementioned Anaïs Mitchell, however, did make the cut, along with an eclectic group of artists including 2Pac, Brandi Carlile and Beyoncé. Mamma mia, here we go.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Kacey Musgraves: “Mother”The shortest, sparsest song on Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 album, “Golden Hour,” is also the most emotionally piercing. “I’m just sitting here, thinking ’bout the time that’s slipping and missing my mother,” the country renegade sings with heartbreaking plaintiveness, before zooming out a generation and imagining that her own mother is probably doing the same. Musgraves has said that “Mother” is one of the “Golden Hour” songs she wrote while tripping on LSD — but don’t tell her mom that part. (Listen on YouTube)2. Beverly Glenn-Copeland: “La Vita”The pioneering composer and new age artist Beverly Glenn-Copeland has, in recent years, experienced a long-delayed and much deserved uptick in popularity thanks to a series of reissues and the enthusiastic embrace of a younger generation of musicians. The enchanting “La Vita,” from Copeland’s self-released 2004 album “Primal Prayer,” features operatic vocals from the soprano Maggie Hollis, over which Copeland intones a stirring lyric that ends with a profoundly grounding reminder: “And my mother says to me, ‘enjoy your life.’” (Remember that refrain; it’s going to make another appearance later in this playlist.) (Listen on YouTube)3. Brandi Carlile: “The Mother”Carlile doesn’t sugarcoat the experience of motherhood in this beautifully written standout from her 2018 album, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” but that gives the song a lived-in honesty, and makes its warmth come across as something more powerful than empty sentiment. “They’ve still got their morning paper and their coffee and their time,” she sings of her “rowdy” friends without children. But for all that is lost, she realizes, so much has also been gained since the birth of her daughter: “All the wonders I have seen I will see a second time from inside of the ages of your eyes.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Merle Haggard: “Mama Tried”“Instead of life in prison I was doing one-to-15 years,” Merle Haggard once admitted of the slight embellishment as to how he spent his 21st birthday in one of his most famous (and semi-autobiographical) songs. “I just couldn’t get that to rhyme.” Though its title gives repentance some lip service — hey, at least he’s not blaming her! — Haggard still sounds like a hellion on this 1968 hit. The more sincere Mother’s Day gift would arrive much later, in 1981, when he released the gospel album “Songs for the Mama That Tried,” and even put sweet Flossie Mae Harp on the cover. (Listen on YouTube)5. 2Pac: “Dear Mama”The rap game “Mama Tried”? Of his cleareyed but thoroughly loving tribute to his mother, Afeni Shakur, Tupac once said, “I aimed that one straight for my homies’ heartstrings.” Mission accomplished. (Listen on YouTube)6. Anaïs Mitchell: “Little Big Girl”This one’s a heartstring-tugger, too. Mitchell is caught between being a child and an elder on “Little Big Girl,” a poignant song from her 2022 self-titled album. There’s a striking moment toward the end when she catches her reflection in a window and sees her mother, tired, “coming home from work.” Mitchell sings with great empathy, “Tell her you love her/Tell her you’re her.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Beyoncé featuring Blue Ivy: “Blue”Named after Beyoncé’s first child, “Blue” is all the more tender for its placement at the end of her imperial 2013 self-titled album; it follows “Heaven,” a wrenching ballad about suffering a miscarriage. Bey’s candor about both the grief of pregnancy loss and the joys of a hard-won motherhood helped this album feel like a turning point in her career: the beginning of her grown-woman era. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Shirelles: “Mama Said”The vocal sound of most ’60s girl groups was chatty and communal — a musical means of sharing wisdom, commentary and advice from woman to woman. This classic from the great early ’60s hitmakers the Shirelles passes on some maternal know-how that mama acquired in the days when she, too, was just a teenager in love. (Listen on YouTube)9. Romy: “Enjoy Your Life”Remember that Glenn-Copeland refrain? The xx’s Romy Madley Croft samples it to extraordinary effect in this recently released and stirringly soulful solo single. “I made a promise to my mother to stop worrying ’bout my problems,” she sings, as Glenn-Copeland’s voice rings out like a compassionate elder bestowing glowing benevolence on a musical daughter: “My mother says to me, ‘Enjoy your life.’” (Listen on YouTube)Hi, Mom,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Mother of All Playlists” track listTrack 1: Kacey Musgraves, “Mother”Track 2: Beverly Glenn-Copeland, “La Vita”Track 3: Brandi Carlile, “The Mother”Track 4: Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”Track 5: 2Pac, “Dear Mama”Track 6: Anaïs Mitchell, “Little Big Girl”Track 7: Beyoncé featuring Blue Ivy, “Blue”Track 8: The Shirelles, “Mama Said”Track 9: Romy, “Enjoy Your Life”Bonus TracksSome wise words from the Swedish pop queen Robyn, on her 2010 song “Include Me Out”: “All hail to the mamas, who hold it down/Hail to the pillar of the family/This one’s for the grannys, take a bow.”Also, few songwriters have captured the experience of adoption as poignantly and prismatically as Joni Mitchell did on “Little Green,” from her legendary 1971 album, “Blue.”Speaking of Joni: Hear a newly released recording of her performing “Both Sides Now” at last year’s Newport Folk Festival (and music from Dolly Parton, Rhiannon Giddens and more) in this week’s Playlist. 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      Record Shopping in New Jersey: A Playlist From a Fresh Haul

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      Thumbing through the crates at the Princeton Record Exchange, and rediscovering albums by Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt, Broadcast and Merle Haggard.Lindsay ZoladzDear listeners,I love the unpredictability of walking into a record store with a regularly replenished New Arrivals section. You never know what you’ll find: maybe that obscure rarity you’ve spent years hunting down, maybe a familiar classic discounted too low to resist, maybe a chance purchase that sends you down a rabbit hole of related artists. To honor this spirit of musical serendipity, here’s the first of a recurring Amplifier segment, My Record Haul, featuring playlists from my recent finds at brick-and-mortar record shops.I’m going to begin close to home, with a visit to one of my favorite record stores in the world (maybe one of my favorite places in the world, full stop) the Princeton Record Exchange: a vast 4,300-square-foot music lover’s paradise tucked down a side street near Princeton University’s campus. I try to swing by the PREX (as it’s known to regulars) as often as possible; inventory there turns over so quickly (by some estimates, they move 40,000 items a month), the New Arrivals shelves are always fresh.Some of my recent finds talk to each other in unexpected ways. Listen along here on Spotify as you read, and hear 12 new songs out this week in the Playlist.1. Linda Ronstadt: “You’re No Good”“Working at a store like this,” one of the managers told me at the register, “you really get a sense of who was selling massive quantities of records back in the day.” He was talking about Billy Joel (“so much Billy Joel”), but also Linda Ronstadt, whose 1976 collection “Greatest Hits” went seven-times platinum — which means there are now enough used copies floating around to make it a cheap investment. ($2.99, in this case.) I know that Ronstadt is currently enjoying an uptick in popularity with a younger generation thanks to her 1970 ballad “Long, Long Time” being featured on an episode of “The Last of Us,” but — being woefully behind on pretty much all TV shows — what inspired me to dig deeper into her catalog was the fantastic, heartbreaking 2019 documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Stevie Wonder: “Superstition”My colleague Jon Pareles’s fantastic 50th-anniversary commemoration of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album “Talking Book” made me realize it’s probably the classic Stevie release I’m least familiar with. How serendipitous, then, to find a mint-condition used copy in one of the first stacks of new releases I flipped through! I am, of course, not suggesting that you will be discovering “Superstition” through this playlist. I am merely suggesting that it has been far too long since you’ve really listened to “Superstition,” even if you listened to it five minutes ago. (Listen on YouTube)3. Broadcast: “Goodbye Girls”Last October, on a vacation in Nashville, I found myself fiddling around with a small vintage keyboard in the hands-on “novelties lounge” at the wonderfully curated Third Man Records store. Its sound was warm, staticky and viscerally reminiscent of a particular album I couldn’t place until the walk back to my hotel, when it hit me — it was the British electronic group Broadcast’s singular “Tender Buttons” from 2005, which for some reason I hadn’t listened to in ages. I’ve been correcting that error in the months since, and though I mostly buy used records, I couldn’t resist dropping $22 on a new pressing of this baby. If only that synthesizer had been priced as reasonably … (Listen on YouTube)4. Merle Haggard: “Where No One Stands Alone”I’ve been going through a Merle Haggard phase for the past few months, since reading the recently released second edition of David Cantwell’s excellent book on the Hag, “The Running Kind.” While I didn’t find the exact Haggard record on my wish list (his eclectic 1979 midlife crisis record “Serving 190 Proof”), I did find an LP that ranks high on Cantwell’s listening guide: “Songs for the Mama That Tried,” a 1981 collection of gospel standards dedicated to the long-suffering mama name-checked in one of Haggard’s most famous songs. I find his bare-bones arrangement of Mosie Lister’s gospel standard “Where No One Stands Alone” quite moving. (Listen on YouTube)5. Stevie Wonder: “Big Brother”This song has such a gorgeous lead vocal melody, the intricate layering of musical elements that makes “Talking Book” such a symphony of self, and lyrics that (“I live in the ghetto, you just come to visit me ’round election time”) are as unfortunately relevant as ever five decades later. (Listen on YouTube)6. Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “The Fightin’ Side of Me (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center)”The Country section at PREX certainly doesn’t get pride of place — I actually had to sit on the floor to flip through it — but that also means you can find some gems for pretty cheap. In addition to “Songs for the Mama,” I picked up the rollicking 1970 live album “The Fightin’ Side of Me (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center),” which of course has a fiery rendition of the title track, a Haggard live staple. I like how, in the sequencing of this playlist, Wonder and Haggard seem to be talking back to one another … (Listen on YouTube)7. Broadcast: “America’s Boy”… and how Trish Keenan, on this icy indictment of American military might, seems to be talking right back to Haggard. (Listen on YouTube)8. Linda Ronstadt: “When Will I Be Loved”A recent argument I had with a friend: Is Kelly Clarkson her generation’s Linda Ronstadt? (As in, “an expert interpreter of familiar material, and an effortlessly fluent liaison between the worlds of rock, pop and country,” as I put it in a piece last year about Clarkson the cover artist.) Discuss! (Listen on YouTube)9. Bonnie Owens with Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “Philadelphia Lawyer (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center)”I’ll leave you with this charming cameo from Haggard’s wife at the time, the country singer Bonnie Owens, topically tackling Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer.” I love how she admits to flubbing the lyrics — “Oh I forgot to say what the Philadelphia lawyer said to Bill’s Hollywood maid!” — and launches back into the song without missing a beat. (Listen on YouTube)Very superstitious,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Record Shopping at Princeton Record Exchange: Hear My Haul” track listTrack 1: Linda Ronstadt, “You’re No Good”Track 2: Stevie Wonder, “Superstition”Track 3: Broadcast, “Goodbye Girls”Track 4: Merle Haggard, “Where No One Stands Alone”Track 5: Stevie Wonder, “Big Brother”Track 6: Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “The Fightin’ Side of Me (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center”Track 7: Broadcast, “America’s Boy”Track 8: Linda Ronstadt, “When Will I Be Loved”Track 9: Bonnie Owens with Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “Philadelphia Lawyer (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center)”Bonus tracks“The store has withstood the coming of CDs. Now it must face the internet.” Here’s a Times report from 2000 about the Princeton Record Exchange at a crossroads. (Spoiler: Almost 23 years later, they’re still in business.)Also, here’s my favorite passage from David Cantwell’s aforementioned Merle Haggard biography, discussing Haggard’s 1994 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame: “Merle’s acceptance speech was perfectly in character. Rather than thanking a Young Country music industry that applauded him tonight but wouldn’t play his records come morning, he made a point of recognizing first ‘my plumber out in Palo Cedro … for doing a wonderful job on my toilet.’” (It’s true! You can watch the video here.) More