Our First Review

From Doug MacCash of Nola.com:

New Orleans music writer Alex Rawls has a passion for Christmas music in all its heart-tugging, sometimes cheese-dripping glory. For Rawls it’s more than wintertime sonic wallpaper, it’s a frosty window into pop culture.

If you tune into his new podcast “The 12 Songs of Christmas,” don’t expect sentimentality, expect lively, opinionated conversations with musicians who sometimes find themselves making the stuff. Rawls understands the magnetic attraction and the equal repulsion. It’s all in play.

In my favorite episode so far, he and Canadian world music maestro Chris McKhool of the Sultans of String discuss John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over), which they decide is the counter culture’s one contribution to the yuletide canon.

In the same episode, New Orleans’ sardonic burlesque rapper Boyfriend and Rawls discuss their mutual fascination with the ever-melancholy Carpenters and their song “Merry Christmas Darling,” which Boyfriend argues is a marvel of modernism. What other song, she muses, includes the verb Christmasing?

For pop music nerds (we know who we are), “The 12 Songs of Christmas” is cookies and eggnog for the brain.