Dinner Music #165: The weekly lineup
non-holiday holiday music
This week we’re listening to albums and songs that sound like they could be holiday music, but aren’t. I do love holiday music. Truly, there is something very special about the warm and melancholy feeling many songs evoke. White Christmas? Sleigh Ride? Mele Kalikimaka? But there are so many excellent holiday playlists already and we’ve all been listening to holiday music non-stop since mid-November. So, here’s some music you can put on when you absolutely can’t listen to Silver Bells one more time.
We begin with Sade’s Promise, her second album, after Diamond Life, and the first album ever to reach number one on both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200. I’ve said before that Sade is an excellent choice for non-holiday holiday music. There’s emotion, melancholy, high-energy, and some choice holiday-adjacent instrumentation, like chimes and saxophone, that makes this album in particular a great one to put on when you want to get into the spirit without subjecting yourself to thirty versions of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Next, we have Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins. This album has a lot of shimmer and late-eighties synth punch, which brings to mind the sound of Wham’s “Last Christmas.” The harmonies sound reverent, hymn-like, and alongside the instrumentation there’s a healthy mix of joy and nostalgia (the key ingredients for a holiday song). A great choice for a household that leans Gen-X and Millennial. Any chance I get, I will advocate for On the Lips by Molly Lewis, which is a perfect album for nearly any occasion. The oceanic feeling calms and brings one into a state of easy bliss. That term, oceanic feeling, was coined during a correspondance between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland, where Rolland writes (in French):
But I would have liked to see you doing an analysis of spontaneous religious sentiment or, more exactly, of religious feeling which is [...] the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the eternal (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and like oceanic).
Let us all revel in spontaneous religious sentiment this week! Now, we have In Dreams from Roy Orbison. I got to thinking about how a lot of music that David Lynch used in his films and Twin Peaks could be holiday-adjacent. Here’s a scene from Wild at Heart that has nothing to do with Christmas, but the buildings in the background are strung with lights:
David Lynch was deeply attracted to the way that darkness permeates under the veneer of mundane Americana and what could be more mundane Americana than Christmas? We end with Illinois by Sufjan Stevens, a very earnest attempt to capture a piece of America in music.
Enjoy.