Best Modern Original Christmas Songs

Baaaahumbug!

 

Sleepyrebels — A Very Sleepy Christmas

 

The New Pornographers — Joseph, Who Understood

 

Ronald Shannon Jackson - Harmolodic Christmas

 

The real pity about this thread, is that so many of us have looked around the corners of the traditional retreads, and found valid new classics that are yet to be heard.

Particularly in America, we have a radio station in almost every town now, that flips to all-Christmas formats, provided they wouldn't lose a significant portion of their audience, in pursuit of different listeners to build up their fanbase with.

And the real pity about that is...these are all-age, general-interest (some would say, "casual, low-interest") audiences who are only satisfied if they can have a station where "Santa Baby" and "Baby It's Cold Outside" get aired every 45 minutes. These stations literally don't have time to introduce audiences to fresher, more modern music because they expect the nostalgia and familiarity of a warm cup of Perry Como. Over and over. Because so many of them tune in and tune out so fast, and when they come back, there better be a Burl Ives and a Carpenters song within the next 5 minutes, or they're gone again. Ironic, the station that plays barely any nativity-based music but "The Little Drummer Boy", isn't the same sort of station that made "The Little Drummer Boy" a hit back in 1958.

So, keep sharing these modern discoveries with your family and friends; stream them, post them, buy and catalog them...because there's probably a corporate-owned button on every radio in every car in your town, pretending that these don't exist.

 

Meanwhile, here's a nativity-based modern song from a Nashville singer-composer-producer, that first appeared on a Rhino comp called Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, which I bought for stray Roches tracks. This stunned me:

This is not the original recording, but close, and since Warner owns Rhino, one assumes it was part of that YouTube purge a decade or so ago.

 

Chris Isaak - Christmas (2004)

Brightest Star:


(alternate link in case this official one is regionlocked: Chris Isaak - Brightest Star)