Switched on Pop - Wham! Op. 84 “Last Christmas” with Chilly Gonzales

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

Wham’s 1984 contribution to the holiday cannon, “Last Christmas,” has surprising staying power. When Grammy-winning pianist Chilly Gonzales set out to record a holiday album, “A Very Chilly Christmas,” most of the selections were over a half century old. That’s because most of our favorite seasonal songs come from the 1960s and earlier. But in addition to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas,” Wham’s “Last Christmas” reliably returns each winter. Despite the cheesy 80s synths and drum machines, the song’s harmonies are remarkable resilient, a testament to George Michael’s auteur songwriting method. Celebrated artist known for his solo piano works, collaborations with Feist and Daft Punk, and his musical masterclasses series, Chilly Gonzales—musical genius—AKA “Gonzo,” sits down at the piano to share in the beauty of this nu-classical Christmas love song, as well as a few selections from his new album “A Very Chilly Christmas.” MORE Get tickets for A Very Chilly Christmas Special airing Dec 23rd at www.chillygonzales.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Hello, Charlie. Hey, so a major thing has happened while you've been out on paternity leave. I know you're just wrapping up a few more weeks. What's that? Well, we have hit our 200th episode. Oh, good grief. How does it make you feel?

That's like way too much pop music overanalysis that we've put out into the world. I guess, you know, we could spend a whole hour breaking it down, but I think what we should do is do it we always do. Pick a song. I've got a fun thing for everybody. But before we get to it, I just want to say a big thank you, first to you for being a phenomenal co-host. It is the most fun thing we could possibly do with our lives, and I am very grateful.

And I want to say thank you also, of course, to our team. and most of all to all of our listeners, you are the reason why we do this. And I just want to say, you're welcome. All right, enjoy the show. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding,

and today I am joined by a very special guest, Chili Gonzalez, musical genius. Gonzo, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. This is long overdue. We've been planning this for years. It's fun as we get to break down some material, which is truly old and also somewhat new,

you have put out a holiday album called A Very Chilly Christmas. You describe it as from feudal oldies to newer holiday pop canon, A Very Chilly Christmas has grandeur and solemnity, an original featuring Feist and covers featuring Jarvis Cocker, and of course there's Mariah Carey, which is very important.

But today, I'm particularly interested, in zooming into one song because there's one track on here that frankly comes as a bit of surprise to me and it's Wham's Last Christmas. When you hear Wham's Last Christmas, what does it make you think of? Probably what everyone else thinks of. The video, the sweaters, the sort of playful faces of a snowball fight gone horribly right. I think it's a very key. I think it's a very Itchy artifact that's still quite heartwarming for our generation. It's a deceptively strange song when you realize that it's not really a formulaic genetically engineered hit.

You can hear that it's the song of an otur, I would say. The song is credited to Wham, but in reality is a 100% George Michael show. I understand he played everything on it. He played all the synths, all the program of the drum machine. He pulled a Stevie or a prince or whatever you want to call it and decided to go full O'Tour, played every note. And I just got fascinated with the singularity of the vision that could make this song. And that coupled with his reputation as something so kitschy,

that always interests me. Because you tend to think of kitsy, guilty pleasures, as some people call them, as being overly calculated, overly eager to please, desperate in some way for attention. Especially a holiday song. That's right,

but I don't really think last Christmas is that. I think it is more layered, more complex, a little bit more, I'm going to sound very pretentious to use a French word, a laitroix, which sort of means random,

but also just means something unto itself. Yeah. And that's what I got fascinated with, as I tried to play on the piano, because when you play a song that has such a distinct production and you reduce it on the piano, and that's the power of the piano, is it reduces songs to that atomic level, I suddenly realized, hmm, the verses of this song don't really exist. It's more a chorus that keeps on repeating, and then these kind of freestyle things that we call verses, for lack of a better

term, which are more just like cadenzas or riffs or would feel more like improvised sort of repartee, almost like recitative in an opera. I'd love for you to break this down a little bit. You say that there are these different sections. We have a primary chorus and then these recissatives. Could you show us a little bit of what you mean by this? Yes. So in opera, recitative was a sort of name given to all the stuff that happens in between the hits,

which are called areas. It tends to be non-repeating stuff. To our modern ears, it just sort of sounds like weird pitter-patter. In an opera, they literally will have a section where it's like, please come in, sit yourself down, and da-da-da-da-da. And, you know, it tends to have these sort of stopping

and starting effect. And it's not something you can really hum along with. If you listen to the opera thousands of times, you might commit it to memory. But it's not really. meant to be taken as areas, which are these sort of money shot moments in operas, the equivalent of songs and musicals where a very particular feeling gets sort of expressed by the hero or heroine of the story. And so I sort of liken the area part of last Christmas would obviously be the

chorus. It was very confessional. It's talking about how last Christmas he expressed his love to someone and then ended up being rejected. It's a very classic chord and melody structure, in a sense. I know you guys have gone through these shifts from major to minor thousands of times because what a great pop song does is it paints the words with the chords. And so, you know, when he says last Christmas, I gave you my heart, we're still in relatively positive territory. We're sort of there with him as he dared to sort of dream that his love might be requited. So we have a major chord, right? And as soon as he sort of tells, well, this is actually what happened.

All of a sudden, we go to a minor chord, and it's quite sad what happened because the person who was the recipient of his love gave it away. And then we go to, you know, very typical almost 50s sort of high school ballad kind of chord progression. And that in itself, I suppose, is the iconic part of last Christmas. you could sort of leave it there. That's more or less what I did. I really focused my version on going back and forth

between this classic area melody and chords and alternated it with a part where there's no singing at all. So the strange thing about Last Christmas is that you hear this chorus part. And right away, the chords continue, but you're treated to a keyboard solo. It's the first thing you hear. after the chorus.

That's quite strange. I can't think of that many songs that do that. And again, I have to think of opera for some reason, because in opera, you often have a statement of a theme, and then you'll have some orchestral accompaniment that kind of sums it up. Here, we can really hear that George Michael was just exploring. The solo goes precisely like this.

Now, I really picture him in the studio coming up with that, not realizing how iconic his song would be, because he just kind of picked out a few notes, I guess, and kind of like that solo. I have a hard time imagining he sat there with like a feather dipping it into the ink and saying, okay, what is the perfect musical response to this chorus I've written?

It does sound off the cuff in a really lovely way. I decided to turn that into a kind of cello line that would respond to the melody of the chorus. So in a way, I did what he didn't do. I took out my feather dipped in ink and said, this improvised keyboard solo is now hallowed ground that I'm going to orchestrate with a cello in response to this.

And then we have these verses, which are basically unplayable on a piano. Like I said, maybe an instrument like a saxophone or one of the more vocal imitation-friendly instruments, whatever those might be, maybe some string instrument. So he goes into this verse, you know, Once bitten and twice shy.

Again, he's improvising. If I would have played, it didn't really fall under the fingers in the right way. So I just kind of did away with those verses and just sort of focused on, again, that back and forth between the improvised keyboard solo and the iconic chorus. But it's so interesting that these verses have this improvised quality, because when he comes back to them, he doesn't use the same melody. I have the feeling that he, had the lyrics written down on a piece of paper and essentially just let rip. And in that way, maybe he's, you know, maybe even in some ways closer to how a rapper might approach, not being that precise in the melodic and rhythmic placement of verses, but rather having

the text sort of give you the impetus to sort of improvise around and find a perfectly imperfect take of your verse, you know, always leading up to a chorus that's much more like etched in stone and iconic. It's an interesting way of composing a piece because in a song that is pretty long, with a lot of moving back and forth between chorus, chorus, chorus, verse, the verse actually provides a great degree of sort of freshness. There's always a different way that he performs it. And so we stay grabbed into the song and ready to hear the iconic chorus again. You've, of course, shortened the piece down to sort of focus really on that core moment. One of the things that I love about his melody is that despite what can sound like some pretty

kitschy production today, there's just this great degree of sentimentality in the construction of his melody. I was wondering if you might even just slow it down on the piano and really sort of highlight those really sentimental moments where the melody is not quite in concert with the chords underneath. That's right. And I just want to just circle back for a second. What you said about the freshness of that verse, the keyboard solos, then coming back to the chorus, the chords never changed in the original WAM version. You really have a template like a rap song where you have the same music that literally just continues. And even the variation in what instruments are playing,

the drums are pretty much going whole hog the whole time, synthesizers are pretty much there the whole time. So there isn't even the sort of subtle changes in instrumentation that you often get in modern pop where it's true that you often have the same chord progression go through an entire song. Contra, songwriting from the 50s to the 80s, which tended to view chord changes. as a particular way of creating variation. Now people tend to do that with sound. I tend to say that sound has replaced harmony in that respect. That's where arrangement comes from,

whether a sound is playing or not, rather than whether the chords have changed. But to get to what you're saying, and this brings us back, we start with this major chord, but the first note is not technically part of that chord. And even though it's not horribly dissonant, that chord, which is the second degree, you know, a major chord starts, it has a one,

has a three and a five, that's what we call a major triad. And every song, Christmas or not, will tend to pick one of those notes as its starting point. It's fairly rare. I mean, I really was racking my brain to think of songs that would start with this second degree. There are. There's Joanne.

by Cool and the Gang. There's Barry Manilow's Can't Smile Without You. We have the same second degree. And in fact, Barry Manilow did sue George Michael for perceived copyright infringement because his song goes, Smile without you. I can't smile without. I mean, it really is quite similar to last Christmas.

And I think they settled out of court, if I'm not mistaken. But starting with that second degree is something you definitely would not hear in an old Christmas carol. Let's say that. It has more of this angular perspective that you would never find in an old folk song because folk songs weren't about one person's perspective. They were about something collective. You don't hear the word I in an old Christmas carol. Here we're definitely in some other territory because we're in the world of pop music,

which comes from the culture of the individual and, you know, the hallowing of a musical celebrity, but you have to remember Christmas carols predate all of that in a really wonderful way, but that means that their melodies tend to have less perspective. There's less the ego of the composer, or to paraphrase Marina Abramovich, the artist is less present in a old folk song. But here the artist is present, and that permits the artist to say, oh, I'm going to start on this benevolent dissonance, I guess I would call it. Which should also be at it. that a Christmas carol ought to start on a note that we can all grab and easily hear, and it might take someone, like a George Michael, someone who is a vocalist to comfortably land

on that note at the beginning of a song. Exactly right. Exactly right. And that's why those folk songs have their social function to bring people together because a child or an amateur or a highly drunk person all have their way in to jingle bells because the first note is that third degree. It is one of the three notes of the major triad. and it's obviously something you can pick out. Yeah, right, right.

Last Christmas. You might need some training to pull that off. Colorful. So where does he take us from there? So what he does is he uses that second degree as a kind of point of tension and then tends to resolve it on the root chord, the first note of the triad. Right. Which is this.

So we have that a couple times. Last Christmas, we have it once. this sort of tension of the second degree falling to the harmonious first degree. Does it again when he says it gave you my heart. Now we have this subtle emotional shift where we have the minor chord and he uses descending melody because of course we've gone into a slightly darker lyrical theme here. So he repeats one more time that same formulation from the first line, the very next day.

And then he sort of transposes it. And he does the same trick on the minor chord when he says, gave it away. That gave, gave. We have that again, that benevolent dissonance. It's the second degree, but this time it's the second degree

of the new chord. So he's essentially using the same trick of quick tension and resolution in his melody, all building toward this sort of wistful, you know, when, when melodies fall, we tend to hear them as sort of more wistful.

When melodies rise, we tend to think of optimism. It's just a little bit like a smile goes up and a frown goes down. And essentially, music does tend to mirror that. There are exceptions, of course, to that rule. But in a general rule, I would say that's the case. And some composers are really well known for almost always ending their melodies on something lower. I happen to be one of those composers. I sort of realized at a certain point,

I tend to start somewhere, build up in a kind of hope, but then I always thwart the hope. So, oops, back to where we started. That trip to the world of optimism wasn't quite what I was expecting, and I'm sort of back where I started. George Michael continues this. The next chord, you know, when he says, this year, the same trick, the second degree falling to the first degree.

It's a little bit chief. And it just continues like that. So it's a very masterful way of keeping the listeners sort of on these tenter hooks because every new chord brings with it that first little tense second degree, not quite part of the chord, and then gives us that little sweet satisfaction of falling into harmony. For me, maybe it's a little melodramatic. But each time I hear that opening tension, it feels like just a miniature heartbreak, right? That line, I gave you my heart, gave it away.

And the words and the melodic construction just really follow each other so beautifully. It's so rare that what can sound like a fairly cheesy song from the 1980s is going to make me feel wistful. But, wow, does it work on this one? And I think it works particularly well in your translation. I'm curious as you were thinking about adapting this to solo piano with a little bit of accompaniment. How did you want to shift the sort of emotional weight of the song? What did you want people to feel from it? Well, I wanted to turn it into a carol, which meant I wanted to, in a way, imagine that it would be one of those

selfless pieces of folk music. Carols live in our collective unconscious, and a carol, you don't tend to think of at one particular recording. So you don't have really a sonic blueprint in your mind if I ask you to think of jingle bells. I don't think you're going to think of one recording. You kind of actually have it somewhere in your brain as an abstraction or to get more pretentious in the platonic world of forms where Plato would say, how do we know what a circle is? Because we have some Uber circle in our mind. And now I look around my house. I see a Christmas wreath. I see a glass full of water. I see all these things that are circles. And I know that there's circles because I compare them to that Uber

circle that's in my mind. And in a way, carols function the same way. That's why when I play jingle bells in a minor key, you've broken the platonic ideal. We recognize the shape of it. You can take so many liberties with one of these songs because it's in your mind already. And therefore, every new version you do, you're just adding to the thousands of versions that have been played before. and it's this beautiful feeling of connection with a song because you're not referring to anything except an abstraction in people's minds. That's a rare opportunity for me as a musician

where I compose my own music or if I do covers, I do covers of pop songs for my radio show or other things like that. Suddenly I realized I was on this other, very fertile ground because nobody has a recorded version in mind. Now, with Last Christmas, it's completely the opposite. You're either,

fighting against or attempting to, let's say, reappropriate from a version that already exists in people's minds. And that includes many dated production techniques that includes the voice of George Michael and a voice. Well, there's nothing more individualistic than a voice. It carries with it all of the emotion of the song. So yes, you have to kind of pass this test to move a song like that to the piano and to sort of see, is this song really compositionally sound enough that it will work divorced from all those references? How much are those production tricks and the voice of the artist? How much weight are they pushing compared to the actual composition of the song? And it's rare that we get that side-by-side comparison of the song as written and the song as

recorded. My whole life as a pianist, I always felt like the pianist. is the one instrument that can get us down to that atomic level. It almost removes all references, even though the piano itself can be considered a reference. It probably has the least amount of referential baggage because it has stood the test of time in Western music and you hear it in a rap song, as much as you still hear it in classical music,

as much as you hear it in jazz. It is the great reducer, let's say, as an instrument. So it's a bit of a test to take a song which is so characterized by its time period, its production, the references. And when you play it on the piano, you get a clean shot at the composition finally. So when I started to play it, I realized, first of all, it definitely passes the test. Right. As far as the chorus is concerned.

But as I told you, those verses didn't really pass that test. Those verses are linked to George Michael and his semi-improvised, whether it was truly improvised or not, it has the feeling of being improvised, those verses which are like recitative and which would never work strictly played on a piano as we saw earlier. So suddenly I realized, okay, the chorus passes that test. I'm going to have to do a shorter version. I'm going to have to orient this version around the chorus. And then I realized I had my golden opportunity with that first keyboard solo, which I'll remind everybody. And that that could be a perfect counterweight. And what's more, the one thing that George Michael doesn't do in his version, is sing the chorus

and that melody from the keyboard solo at the same time. And that became my concept for the song. What I'm going to do is treat that offhand sort of whipped off keyboard solo. I'm going to treat it as canon. As I said, I think he just kind of whipped it off. I treated it like it was a pronouncement from Beethoven himself, you know, and thought, okay, I am going to introduce the chorus. I'm going to introduce the material of the keyboard solo.

We're going to come back to the chorus, and now we're going to hear that keyboard solo treated even more reverentially by the addition of a cello, and a very slight harpsichord, giving just some bit more rhythmic intention. And then my money shot was to play those two together, where the chorus, the iconic chorus, and the tossed-off keyboard solo suddenly harmonize.

You can hear that moment where you have this feeling of counterpoint like you would have in an old classical piece. And that, of course, has a slight Baroque association, Counterpoint, which is simultaneous playing of two melodies that sort of, in a sense, accidentally create harmony. It's very different from how music is made today, where we tend to have a chord in the left hand and a melody in the right.

So it was a bit of a throwback to Baroque aesthetics. In that also I put in a harpsichord, which was the precursor to the piano, which has a much more sharp kind of sound. And so in a way, I was able to add just a slight Baroque touch to last Christmas, which I think gives it a nice sheen and it's something playful as well to imagine a song that we think of as quite cheesy in the 80s and give it the airs of what we consider to be high art in terms of Baroque instrumentation.

You had said earlier that contemporary songwriting lean so heavily on sound for its arrangement and form as opposed to harmony. And contemporary songs in that way can be harder to translate into solo piano because, as you pointed out, they might rely so heavily upon sound techniques that just sound a little too straight and metric on the piano. You can't have that beautiful melisma, those bends and so on. And so the George Michael track in many ways was sort of ahead of its time and that it was so that it's sort of borrowing from a sort of rap style of vocal melodic production. And it's also its simplicity and its chord forms. And so what you've done is you've brought it into the past by giving us this broke counterpoint.

You introduce the cello, give it some solemnity, and of course the harpsichord as well, which I think has so much resonance with other sort of holiday sounds. It's dulcimer-like. It feels like it perfectly fit in with the rest of what's going on in your album, which I'd love to dive into a little bit more. And I want to ask you, there's a lot of Christmas albums. Why another one? Because I couldn't find the one I liked. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready? not sugarcoat something for me.

No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue.

President Trump is now targeting predominantly. Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent, display. that we've seen in the street from ICE.

When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually.

Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. What's the problem with Christmas albums? Well, for me, the problem with Christmas albums is that they've been co-opted by capitalism, and that has mirrored what Christmas has become in our society. So I come from a secular Jewish family, but we celebrated Christmas because we want to fit in, essentially. It's not about Jesus anymore.

It's much more about Santa Claus. It's about the gifts. And those songs become the soundtrack of every commercial, every trip shopping. And it loses touch with what I loved about Christmas songs when I was growing up, which is sitting around the piano. You know, our family was around the piano. My brother, who's a musician as well,

one of the two of us would be there. You know, I've been playing these songs for decades. I have my little twists and turns and my little arrangements, and I've always had them. And, you know, as I grew up and started to have sing-alongs with, like, you know, my friends, people my age. And, you know, even more recently, I see how songs like Last Christmas or All I Want for Christmas is You,

I see just as a pure entertainer the power of those songs and people, you know, they take their beer bottle and use it as a fake microphone and they just let go. And I in a way had the same problem with all I want for Christmas is you

in a more strong form, which is Mariah's voice is so strident and it's like a giant hair dryer that no one can, you know, stand up against. It took me a while to find the melody of that song. I know that sounds strange. but it's so much about her voice

and the production is so intense I think there's 50 tracks of sleigh bells with like on maximum reverb setting and it's just really really like wow okay your version of that song though really grabs the first half of All I Want for Christmas is you

which we've broken down on the show before and that song I think in some ways illustrates exactly what you're talking about the first half of All I Want for Christmas is sort of nodding to a much older style of caroling. It has some darker edges. The instrumentation is much simpler and organic. And it's the second half of the song, which we most associate with the sort of mall shopping, holiday, Christmas time. It becomes very pop production. It's an excellent production. It's wonderful.

But it's the other side of this sort of more, if you will, superficial side of Christmas. And so your version really just focuses on that first half. Well, and I will say that the melody is not, I think, very easy for everyone to sing along with. Now, that doesn't stop them from trying. So when people get to the right level of drunkenness at a Christmas sing-along, that's when you whip out all I want for Christmas is you. It's the third set. But it's hard to sing.

There's a lot of range there, you know? Most Christmas songs, you don't move your hand when you're playing them on the piano. You know, you're just kind of like, okay, you know. Right, right. I think it was Irfing Berlin who wrote so many great holiday songs. Stay. Yeah, you sort of stay in the major scale. You know, you're probably not going to go past the range of about one octave. Two, three, four notes, even less. Really, I would say less than a fifth. And that there tends to be a lot of scales in those songs. Scales tend to be easier to sing because you always have the next note in mind. Jumps are harder to sing than scales. And here we have, of course.

That's just a scale. Right, right. You know, we three kings, same. What's that one? The first Noel. I mean, joy to the world is literally a major scale. You know, so this is all designed to be easy to sing. And then you have the Mariah, where all of a sudden, it's like, oh, this is for professionals only, you know.

Ooh. You know, my hands going all over the place here, you know. Syncopated, big leaps. Yeah. Every phrase has these sort of complicated arpeggios with these kind of blue notes and very sneaky, chromatic twists and turns that you tend to not hear in the old-fashioned Christmas songs. But in the new Christmas songs, starting with the jazzy era, Bing Crosby, you do have sneakier melodies in general. And I would say this is around the time that Christmas songs start to have the word I in them. This is, I think, related to a kind of communal simplicity versus individual complexity or individual idiosyncrasy, if you will.

Even White Christmas has a very sneaky melody. Check this out. And then this. You know, to find those notes, you probably have to have some vocal training to really pull them off. Yeah. And so we're in an era of the individual already with these pop songs. So the real trick on my album was. how to reconcile this kind of, for better for worse,

this sort of capitalist individualist Christmas aesthetic with the communal folk aesthetic. And the answer turned out to be, I have to make the carols my own, make them very individual, take loss of liberties, turn them into minor, add bars, change the key, be uber playful as much as possible. People can really hear gonzo, capital G.

And then with the selfish songs, strangely, I had to play them less selfishly. and turn them into Christmas canon by removing the artist, removing the towering voice of Mariah Carey or of George Michael. There is often a mullingale in a great holiday track. You have a song like In the Bleak Midwinter. Even the song Last Christmas, right? This is a song about love that doesn't work out in the holiday times.

As much joy as there is in this season, there's also there can be some darkness. It is the period. It's winter. Is that a certain aesthetic that you're trying to capture? Does a holiday song for you need to have as much dark as it has light? Especially in 2020, yes. I could sense already in March with all the changes that the world was going through collectively,

that it would be a different Christmas, and that's what pushed me over to the edge to start recording. Yes, I think there's a certain forced smile to Christmas songs, and it's only telling half the story. even a good Stevie Wonder Christmas song, a good Nat King Cole. It's not always the right mood for those, in my opinion. I keep on thinking that Christmas is a very complex time emotionally, at least for me. It was always tied to a kind of void between the dream that I'm being sold of what Christmas should be, and then the time with the family never quite measuring up to that. I think a lot of people can relate to that.

And so I thought, well, I have to make the album, not just for sitting in front of the, you know, the fireplace with a brandy. I think there's a little bit of that on my album as well. But how about also running upstairs to your childhood bedroom and hiding from your family? What about that? Where's the Christmas music for that? So I just wanted to soundtrack something that had a bit more realism. I knew that there would be more complex emotions this year anyhow, that maybe the world was

catching up to my mixed version of Christmas, finally. And so I thought I'm going to go for it. And I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do these transformations to, to the more well-known songs and to the lesser-known songs, I'm going to really play it straight in a way. And that's how I proceeded, just sort of in this dual way

of like, how far can I push some of these songs into a kind of playful territory where you really feel that very often my approach to music is that music is a toy. We play music. I want to play with it, exactly. Now, when I'm composing, that's, you know, the composing process and the getting to a point where you're ready to record and or play live,

those are very different processes for me. And the composition process in a way has more pretension to it. It is more difficult. It involves more self-judgment issues of identity. And so you can go down some rabbit holes and some false paths, let's say. It's more of a struggle for me. What's always easiest for me is when the song is in my fingers and it feels like it's existed forever,

whether I've written it or not, at least it feels that way. And then I can be nonchalant, playful, and play that version, the version that has to exist in that moment, in that concert hall, in my living room, wherever I happen to be playing it. And I fast forwarded to that with this album. All of a sudden, I was like, wow, no compositional struggle? This is fantastic.

never really done a covers album before. I've compiled some covers here and there, but this was something else. It's like I got to that playful stage almost instantly, with the exception of the original song that I wrote together with Feist and the cover of a Dave Berman song that Jarvis sort of brought to my attention. Other than those, I was just right away and, you know, get up in the morning, turn on the machine and start recording and just waiting for that perfect, imperfect Well, tell me about that. You do have an original track on here, the banister bow with Feist. You said it's a different approach to playing these songs that have been under your fingers, your entire life, sitting around the piano with your family. When you think about writing a Christmas song, what do you want to communicate?

You have these internal struggles with the falseness and the capitalist nature of Christmas, but also the beauty of being around family. What is the Bannister Bough? What do you wanting to do with that song? Well, the song exists because of Feist's insistence on needing to own every syllable of the words. She sings. She's very much a textual musician. And if it doesn't work for her on a lyrical level, it's never going to work.

So we knew that if we're going to do a song for my album, it either has to be an existing song that she can get behind and quickly became clear that she needed to try to find her own words to describe her experience of Christmas. But we did struggle for a while. And at some point, I was talking about the album and I said, in some ways, I want to, like everything in my career, I'm respectful of tradition in certain moments,

but I'm always very conscious that I want to try to create new traditions. traditions. I want to be a man of my time, which means that I place myself after a past and before a future. And somehow it led to her saying, well, I have a new tradition in my family. We don't cut down a tree every year. We think it's cruel to waste trees. In January, you see all these dead trees lying in the road. And as she says, silver tinsle running in the gutters like blood. And so she goes and takes, you know, already fallen dead branches from the ground at her countryside home in Canada. And she creates these these kind of garlands and bows and ties them around the banister of her staircase. So she has a new tradition that is in one sense connected with Christmas,

but in another sense is very 2020. It's in a way an ecological message, but also a message about how tradition is important, but creating new ones is even more important. And once we had that sort of way in, it was, of course, very easy for her to, in a way, write the song. It all came rather quickly. And musically, we placed it in that tradition of White Christmas. It's not written as a carol with a very simple melody. It really has those twists and turns that I was talking about earlier. Very chromatic.

So right away, that would be an equivalent to that sneaky white Christmas, that's sort of hard to find note. would be here. That's that little sweet note. It's kind of juicy, you know. And I think as soon as she sort of came up with that little melodic cell, it became very clear what direction we were going in, much more Bing Crosby, I would say, than original Christmas Carol.

They did the work that beauty does till leaves shook to the ground snow. to turn. It's nice to have a new song on here that does feel truly fitting for this year. And it feels like a tradition, given where our earth is at, that would be a really good one for many of us to pick up. So I hope that this song continues into many years. I know that this record, a very chilly Christmas, is going to make it into my frequent playlist. My number one record, I think, that goes on repeat throughout the entire holiday season is usually Charlie Brown's Christmas.

I like that record because both. We have one of, I mean, just brilliant piano playing, but also, oh, who's the composer? Vince Guaraldi. Vince Garaldi, thank you. So, I mean, so wonderful piano, and it has a lot of that, just as many dark minor twists as it has major uplifts. No, it is, if there is a model conscious slash unconscious, it's definitely the Goraldi album by far. It's instrumental mostly. And it manages to do incredible storytelling around these songs.

and Goraldi is a highly underrated musician. I'm just glad he has at least this Peanuts music that sort of brought him completely out of what would have been, I guess, total obscurity if he hadn't gotten the gig to do the Peanuts music. But even his non-Penets albums are really lovely. He's a wonderful musician. Well, I think that a very chilly Christmas

is going to end up right along there with the Vince Goraldi record for me. Very exciting to share. You also are going to be sharing with the public and a single special event. Do you want to tell us about a very chilly Christmas special? Yes. Well, it became obvious when I made this album

that there's not going to be a lot of touring. This album was made, I wouldn't say in response to, but certainly goaded along by the fact that it was going to be a different year with less traditional contact, whether it's in our social lives, but certainly in our musical lives. I am a entertainer before I'm anything else.

compose so that I may entertain, not other way around. And that is my lifeblood. My mental health has taken a hit by not being up there, to be totally honest. So I thought, well, I at least have to do one filmed concert, which quickly morphed into the idea of doing an old-fashioned Christmas special, like we grew up watching with sketches, with guests, all the sort of, in a way, bad high school acting that you would expect and love to see in such a special. So we quickly put it together with a TV station out here in Europe. But for those who don't live in either a French speaking or German-speaking country,

it's going to be a non-replayable ticketed live stream. It's just 10 bucks. You can only watch it on December 23rd called A Very Truly Christmas Special. There's Jarvis, Cocker, there's Feist, there's all the rest of my Parisian musical family coming in to help out and a wonderful actress who plays Santa Claus going to therapy and I'm her therapist and I use the music, my approach to Christmas songs to sort of get her through the various stages that one would do in and when they're doing psychoanalysis. So it's quite touching. It's also quite ridiculous. So it's a very chilly Christmas special. What else can I say? You can just go to my website and and buy yourself a ticket and have yourself a very chilly Christmas.

All right, so that's chilionzalez.com on December 23rd. If you want to see a very chilly Christmas special, the record is a very chilly Christmas. I was wondering if you might play us out a bit on your melancholic version of Old Lang Zine. What do you call it? I call it Old Lang Minor with a Y. I somehow couldn't resist. You know, when you're dealing with public domain songs,

you have this wonderful chance to rename them if you like. And I didn't rename. At one point I had a version of the album where almost every song was renamed with a little gonzo twist. But in the end, I only opted for Old Lang Minor, not a Christmas song, but the post-Christmas song. So here's hoping 2021 is going to be a bit better than 2020. A beautiful thing. And just to leave it on an optimistic note, I'm going to finish on a major chord.

That was gorgeous. Thank you, Gonzo. What a beautiful thing.