The Making of "Christmas? In This Economy?"

Christmas? In This Economy? (link) is a Christmas album I made with my friend and roommate Joanne. Here's some assorted notes on how we made it.

Joanne also has comments! They'll appear in a little block, like this one below:

Joanne: Hi!

Process

Some evening in early November, one of us (I don't remember who) said, "We should record a Christmas album." Although we joke about doing a lot of dumb things, this particular one was compelling enough that it stuck.

We put together a little playlist of Christmas songs, and I ended up listening to it on loop continuously over the next week or two (which wreaked havoc on my Spotify end-of-year roundup, I'll tell ya). Then I started writing arrangements, and we recorded them as they got finished in a pipeline of sorts.

The nice thing about making a Christmas album is that there's a hard deadline. It's not like you can release one in January, so this forced us to prioritize. When the dust settled, a lot of the parts were worked to a "good-enough" state instead of aiming for perfection, and we cut three songs out of the originally planned eight (which makes this more of an EP, I guess). I am happy with the final result, and we did hit our self-imposed deadline of a week before Christmas.

Joanne: By the way, I literally cannot emphasize enough how much Bobbie carried this album. He wrote/arranged the songs, recorded most of the sounds (as you can tell), and then mixed each song on this album in a relatively short amount of time. There's no one else that could have made this home-recorded Christmas album happen, and Bobbie deserves all the props for it!

Sounds

The tagline on the album page says "Live from our living room". This is a blatant lie (there's a good amount of overdubbing), but it helps me frame all this ambient noise that I recorded as atmospheric instead of a mistake. We also switched up the recording setup over time as we got more comfortable with the equipment and the space (which was actually our living room, okay). You can also pretend these are intentional artistic decisions.

Almost all the sounds you'll hear are acoustic, recorded by a physical microphone in real life, except for the electric bass sounds, which comes from a synthesizer in Musescore. So in theory, we could play this live, if we each had a few extra arms, mouths, and infinitely better coordination.

Joanne: vocals, guitar, shaker (uncooked rice in a mason jar)
Bobbie: vocals, piano (really a mic pointed at the speakers on an electric keyboard), glockenspiel, accordion, melodica, alto saxophone, whistling, various body percussion

Track trivia

Side note: it was not our intention to have the word "Christmas" in the title of every song, it just happened somehow (after the cuts).

Merry Christmas Darling: I actually hadn't heard this song until Joanne showed it to me! It took a good number of takes to get the tuning close to passable on the vocal harmonies here, oops.

Like It's Christmas: Honestly, this song by the Jonas Brothers is underrated and should be played more often in Christmas playlists. This was actually the first song we started recording, and it was also the last one to be completed. I spent a lot of time messing with the sax parts, and I still feel like it could be punchier on the final track.

Last Christmas: During my many listens of Last Christmas while plotting the album, I realized there was a section that overlapped perfectly with a masterpiece of modern music, and I also had the perfect instrument to play it on (the melodica). The rest of the track basically fell into place naturally, with some creative percussion decisions (rice shaker, tongue clicks, and cheek-flick water drop sound). Also, Joanne pointed out that on the original version by Wham!, George Michael pronounces "gave" (/ɡeɪv/) as "gehv" (/gɛv/, rhymes with "rev"), and I've never been able to unhear it. Thanks for that.

Joanne: Here's me expressing my mild offense that you didn't even do the pronunciation...

Christmas Waltz: I also had never heard this one before Joanne mentioned it. This is the kind of song you casually sing by a campfire with your friends on a cold night, getting sharper all the time, and I feel like we nailed that vibe completely.

Joanne: Yeah, I personally hit a point where I was literally throwing out random notes hoping they were close to right. Anyways, great song.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas: I never really liked the line "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" in this song. It turns out this line and others were changed for Frank Sinatra's version because the original lyrics were too depressing! The lyrics on our version are a mix between those two versions (since the original is indeed, depressing), which captures some of my feelings on 2020.

The other, more jarring, change I made to this song is a reference to this extremely important video (if you click one link on this page, please make it this one). Personally I think this is hilarious; it's probably funnier to me than to anyone else. It also does break up the flow of the song a little, so maybe I'll record another more serious version without that bit someday.

Joanne: I think the saxophone parts on this song are particularly lovely.

Hilariously, our living room is both cold and in possession of pretty high ceilings, so our voices resonate differently within it, which is particularly audible in this song.

Honorable mentions to the songs that didn't make it

(Joanne wrote this section)

Mistletoe, by Justin Bieber: We did do some recording on this, but for various reasons it didn't make it to the final album.

12 Days of Christmas (But Each Day Is A Worse Instrument): Alas, this one was more work and time than we had in us. Perhaps this will return at (another) particularly chaotic time in the future.

Landy In My Eggnog, by Snoop Dogg: First of all, did you know the lyrics to this song are literally nowhere on the internet? Shocking.

Bobbie: The world wasn't ready to hear Joanne rapping. Not yet.

Release

There's nothing like the sweet release of death a personal project. It can be nerve-wracking. I went back to re-read my thoughts in Music can be a homecooked meal to reassure myself, and got over it. I do like the music and wanted to share it with other people.

This album is hosted on this website using the native Squarespace album block. This is because I didn't want to deal with making videos, setting up something for a real streaming service like Spotify, and because I didn't like the Soundcloud embed for albums. The Squarespace album block isn't perfect either (there's some weird behavior if you're trying to seek in a track or go back to an already-played song) but it's definitely good enough for a single listen-through, which is all I'm really expecting.

The interesting side effect of putting the album on my website is that it reveals the existence of my blog. It's not like it was a secret before - but my previous attitude towards the blog is that it was like shouting into the void and probably no one will notice it and judge me for the content. Sharing the album on Facebook and Instagram obliterates this assumption and practically guarantees that some people that I know in real life will read these things. Then I got over that too and posted it anyways.

Joanne: Unlike Bobbie, I have not conquered my crippling performance anxiety, but I really like what we made and I'm happy that people are listening to this! Many many thanks to Bobbie for being the braver one between us and putting it up.

Bobbie: If you know Joanne in real life, please send her your love and encouragement! Or else she'll never let me do this again. (If you don't, you can pass it on through me).

Final comments

In the end, I'm pretty satisfied with how things turned out. Thanks to everyone who listened and reacted and those who reached out personally - I really appreciate it and loved hearing from you, even (especially!) if it had been a while since we last talked.

Will there be another Christmas album next year? Maybe, maybe not - making this consumed much of my free time for some weeks (in a good, fun way), and there are plenty more years in our life to plot the next one.

Merry Christmas!

A big thank you to the many people who listened to early snippets and rough versions before release. Especially, thanks to Andy and Yee Aun, who listened mucho and gave incredibly helpful feedback and encouragement over the development of the album. I really, really appreciate it.