Posts by Alby

Foxes and Fossils, the Atlanta-based dads-and-daughters YouTube band, this year covered one of my favorite holiday songs, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Civil War Christmas poem set to John Gorka's original tune.…

This 1987 recording is the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK, and it's pretty popular on these shores, too, though I'll never understand why. Not why…

No 21st-century singer has released more holiday material than multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens. In 2006, riding the crest of his critical acclaim (his LP "Illinois" was the highest-rated album of 2005…

Guest Post by Nathan Arizona “The Christmas Waltz” is a holiday song that exists for one good reason: FRANK WANTED IT. In 1954 Frank Sinatra was about to enter the…

People like to make cracks about the best Christmas music being written by Jews, but you can't blame Felix Mendelssohn for getting that ball rolling. The music Mendelssohn composed in…

Yes, of course this is Mariah Carey's song, but the squeaky-clean Piano Guys get the nod here because they assembled a Lego-mation video that uses the pain-in-the-foot building blocks to…

Guest post by Mike Dinsmore Three million miles. Enough miles to go around our planet 120 times. That's how many miles folksinger Bill Staines traveled in a career that spanned…

Mike Nesmith was a lot more than just a Monkee. He pioneered country rock for a while, then helped make video the dominant music platform of the '80s. He died…

Lots of people and groups have been wrongly neglected by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but had more or bigger hits, or a weirder journey through the underbelly…

Guest post by Nathan Arizona Wishbone Ash will probably never get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Too British, for one thing. Reasonably popular in its 1970s heyday,…

Some people who vote for Democrats, and some who get elected as Democrats, have been calling themselves liberals for generations now. Phil Ochs isn't heard much these days, but he…