Song of the Day 12/16: Paul McCartney, “Wonderful Christmastime”

If you’ve ever seen one of those listicles of the best and worst Christmas songs, you might have noticed an oddity – several of the songs appear on both lists.

I’ve seen “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the most popular song in Delaware according to this story, atop both lists, and “Feliz Navidad” seems to be equally polarizing. But most surprising to me was that this Paul McCartney ditty, widely derided as insufferable, is the most popular holiday tune in both Alaska and Vermont.

Paul McCartney has written a lot of tunes that come in for a brutal slagging – “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” were despised by the other Beatles, and his later output, both solo and with Wings, is full of vapidities like “Open the Door.” In short, “Wonderful Christmastime” is slight, but he’s done worse. I think what makes it insufferable is the horribly dated synth that dominates the track, recorded in 1979. What can I say, kidz, people had never heard a noise with that acoustic profile before and were fascinated by it for a bit, the way drivers slow down for a car wreck. Though Linda McCartney and Denny Laine appear in the pre-MTV video, McCartney played and sang everything on the track himself.

If you ever wondered what turns an annoying song into a standard, time seems to be a key ingredient. Nobody covered “Wonderful Christmastime” for a decade after its appearance and only rarely until about 15 years ago. Since 2008 it’s been covered by over 100 different artists. With all those examples I thought maybe I could determine whether it was the tune that was awful or just the synths. No such luck, because most of the covers, even the a cappella ones, mimic that sound. Check out this string quartet version:

Jimmy Fallon and his house band, the Roots, simulated that sound pretty well when they did a Zoom a cappella cover a few years back. The celebrity cameos include one by McCartney himself.

The MonaLisa Twins are identical twins from Vienna who now work out of Liverpool releasing YouTube videos, mostly Beatles covers. Their simplified instrumentation gives the best evidence that the song isn’t bad once you get rid of those synthesizers.