Each year, dozens of new Christmas albums are released, and every artist tries to record one song that will break through and become a new Christmas classic. I remember back in 1993, right at the height of the Harry Connick Jr. craze (He sounds like Frank Sinatra! He really does!), Connick released a Christmas album [...]
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Believe it or not, one of the wonderful things about Christmas is  that each year, for about three or four weeks, you get inundated with about 50 songs total, each with hundreds of different versions. And then you don’t hear them for another 11 months. So the response is almost Pavlovian: Hearing Christmas songs immediately [...]
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Last April, when my blog was all of one month old, I reported on the best bands to come out of SXSW festival. It was a big undertaking for me, but it was worth it: I discovered such wonderful artists as Nicole Atkins, Clare & the Reasons and Stephanie Dosen, and it was the first [...]
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