Throughout my life, I've loved Christmas music. As a kid in Massillon, Ohio, neighborhood friends and I would go Christmas caroling door to door. The songs that stand out the most from back then are "Deck The Halls," "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." We sang in unison, too young to know the concept of harmonizing. Sometimes we couldn't get through a song without cracking up. I think it was the expressions on our neighbors' faces, that said, "What are we supposed to do with this?"
Christmas was always pretty nice in Ohio. No school and a guaranteed snowy Christmas. To say that my family wasn't well-off would be an understatement, but my hard-working father always made sure he got us kids one gift each. Memorable Christmas gifts that he gave me were an acoustic guitar, and a few years later, a stool that made playing the nylon string guitar easier (with the guitar placed on my left leg, in the traditional classical guitar style).
My mom socked a little money away throughout the year while grocery shopping, fibbing to my father about how much she spent on groceries. That was how she afforded to give her kids a little extra for Christmas. My dad would always look at the amount of gifts my mom got us with a very serious and perplexed look on his face.
One Christmas morning I woke up to bunch of albums under the tree, including Heart's Dreamboat Annie and Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same.
The funniest gift my dad ever got me happened later in life while visiting Ohio in mid-December. I showed up unannounced that December, with gifts for my whole family. We were all gathered in my dad's living room and he said, "Mark. I've got something for you also. Hold on!" He went into his basement and we could hear him bumping things around. We had no idea what was going on. This went on for about thirty minutes and then he came back upstairs and handed me a shoebox full of vintage fishing lures. I didn't have the heart to tell him that they were actually mine; they belonged to me, from my childhood days. But my family got a kick out that gift! (To his credit, he truly didn't recall that they were already mine.)
I remember sending the box of lures to the art department at 4AD (V23) in London twenty-five years ago or so, to have the lures photographed for album artwork possibilities. The box didn't get shipped back right away, which I didn't worry about. I was in no rush to get a bunch of rusty lures back — lures with big, nasty treble hooks. They were of no use to me in California, where I fish on the coast and rarely use lures.
Then one day, I walked into an antique shop and saw the same type of lures priced at $175.00 each! At that point I called someone at V23 and said, "Can I get those fishing lures shipped back?" The lures never made the 4AD album art. They aren't very photogenic, but Paul McMenamin of V23 later used a photo of a small fishing knife that I had included in the box, for the Old Ramon album. Red House Painters had changed record labels at that point, but Paul was still doing art for us.
References to Christmas in my original music appeared early on, in songs like "Have You Forgotten." I'm not sure if there's an album that I've made that doesn't reference Christmas. A Christmas-themed song that I've closed many shows with during the holiday season is "A Dream of Winter."
The first Christmas cover song I did for an audience was "White Christmas," which I whimsically played at Södra Teatern in Stockholm in late November 2000. I recorded all of the shows from that Scandinavian tour, and compiled a live album from them, called Mark Kozelek White Christmas Live, which was released in 2001.
Later in life, I did the same thing again. I compiled a live album from European and North American concerts called Little Drummer Boy Live — a double CD with only one Christmas song — which ended up being my dad's favorite album. Every December, he calls me and says, "I really, really love this album, Mark! My god, this is a good one! I love that you can hear people clapping, and I can understand all the words in 'Little Drummer Boy!'"
I always had it in the back of my mind to record a proper Christmas album, and I had a title for it all along: Mark Kozelek Sings Christmas Carols. I even had the album cover picked out: chandeliers from a storefront on Royal Street in New Orleans.
In December of 2013, engineer Nathan Winter and I were working on one album or another in San Francisco when I said, "You know what? Let's record a Christmas album." He said "Sure!" I had the spirit!
I got to cover many of my favorite Christmas songs, including The Pretenders' "2000 Miles," Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's "I Believe in Father Christmas" and my very favorite, "The Christmas Song." Many of the others were songs I'd remembered from Christmas masses of my childhood. I can still hear the choir singing "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" in the echoey St. Mary's Church in Downtown Massillon. I tried my best to capture that sound on my version, by stacking multiple vocal takes and harmonies on top of each other, but it's nowhere near how good it sounded sung by those other voices in that church.
As tempting as it was to release the album that December, I waited until the following year, so it could be a physical album as well as digital. The album was released November 4, 2014.
I went on to record my mom's very favorite Christmas song "Oh Holy Night" on the Sings Favorites album, with the late Mimi Parker on backing vocals. And in December of 2020, Kevin Corrigan and I released a five song Christmas EP called The Christmas EP, with songs including "Silver Bells" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas."
One of my favorite Christmas memories is of my cat Pink, sniffing the fresh pine of a Christmas tree that Katy and I put up in our San Francisco apartment, back in the mid-1990s. That was our first Christmas with Pink. Katy passed in 2003, and Pink passed in 2010, and I've never put a Christmas tree up in my apartment since. But I never stopped loving Christmas.
This December, I've been carrying around a little piece of paper and writing down the names of Christmas songs that I never got around to recording. "Let it Snow" and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" are on the list. One day I'll get around to recording them. And while I'm at it, I'll record "Deck The Halls" and "Jingle Bells."
Hell, there's still time. I may record them this year.