José James, Bruce Cockburn, and The Twangtown Paramours

Twelve Songs of Christmas

This episode drops on Thanksgiving, and if you're listening on Thursday, Happy Thanksgiving.

Friday is Black Friday, the official, incontrovertible start to the Christmas season, and just in time for it, Twelve Songs has created an alternative to the all-Christmas radio station, Twelve Songs of Christmas Radio on Spotify. It's a 20-plus hour playlist of songs that are or should be Christmas favorites, and all you have to do is click Shuffle to get the radio effect, minus the commercials and station breaks.

If that sounds a little daunting, you can also email me at [e-mail] to get a copy of this year's 90-minute listeners-only Christmas mix. It covers a lot of ground and offers some new takes on Christmas classics, and it will almost certainly introduce you to some Christmas songs you haven't heard before.

For those looking for a more irreverent, indie-oriented Christmas collection, I recommend XO for the Holidays Vol. 10, which fits the bill nicely.

In this week's episode, I'm again featuring excerpts from interviews I conducted this fall. José James presents himself as a jazz vocalist for the hip-hop era, but that's only occasionally obvious on his new Merry Christmas from José James. On it, he and a traditional jazz trio give us a beautiful, timeless Christmas album that sounds like what might happen if a Sinatra-like singer fronted a Bill Evans-led band.

I also talk to Canadian folk artist Bruce Cockburn, who is starting his tour celebrating 50 years in the business in December. The tour should have started last December, but, you know, COVID. We talk about the tour and his 1993 Christmas album, Christmas, including one of the less likely songs on the album and where it came from.

Finally, I talk to Nashville's Twangtown Paramours, who have a new album, Double Down on a Bad Thing, due out in February. We talk a little about that, about how its recording was affected by COVID, and how they used a new Christmas song, "My Gingerbread Man," as a marketing tool.

This episode of Twelve Songs is sponsored by Car-Floats.com, which makes reusable fabric stickers for your car.

If you haven't already done so, please do what you have to do to get Twelve Songs in your podcast feed. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Pandora, and Spotify.