Okay, I know… Thanksgiving is part of “the holidays”, but as I was stressing like a madwoman over Thanksgiving, I feel like I can relax a little now. I’m not one to get as wrapped up in Christmas music as some people do, but I will admit to having some favorite albums for this time of year. Last Christmas, I made a huge holiday music mix that had songs by everybody from Sting and James Taylor to Kathleen Battle and Eden’s Bridge. My mix has bluegrass, classical, rock, pop, soul, and everything in between. What can I say? I have very eclectic tastes.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was recorded in 1975, but was pretty popular in the 80s…
Having come of age in the 80s, a lot of my favorite music comes from that era. Christmas music is no exception. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band famously covered “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” in December 1975 and then released it as a B side to his 80s era hit, “My Hometown”. It’s now a holiday staple! But as much as I like The Boss, I find my tastes lean more toward the traditional. Must be a feature of getting old.
In 1987, Sting made a haunting cover of “Gabriel’s Message” for the 1987 compilation, A Very Special Christmas.
Love this contemplative Christmas song…
Years later, Sting refurbished “Gabriel’s Message” for his 2010 album, If On A Winter’s Night.
Updated with strings and horns, this version is also haunting in a different way.
Last year, I discovered the wonderful holiday offering Joy- An Irish Christmas by Keith and Krystyn Getty. If you like a little Celtic flavor to your holiday music, I recommend it highly! There’s an exciting mix of exciting fast paced music countered by peaceful beautiful songs.
“Jesus, Joy of the Highest Heaven” sung here by Krystyn Getty.
A live version of their “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
And there are also a number of soulful classics available. “Do You Hear What I Hear” by Gladys Knight and the Pips immediately comes to mind… So does the Jackson 5’s Christmas album, which comes complete with Christmas greetings from the brothers. Given that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time they made the album, that must have been an awkward recording session.
“Give Love On Christmas Day” by the Jackson 5.
Or there’s blue-eyed soul by Hall & Oates…
I must admit, I like this song for the video…
And “Please Come Home For Christmas” by The Eagles…
Pat Benatar also does a fine version of this bluesy Christmas staple, but I am partial to Don Henley’s soulful vocals.
Here’s Pat singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.
Talk about a classic. This was done in 1988, when I was still a lass.
My all time favorite Christmas album, though, has to be James Taylor’s A Christmas Album, which he made in 2004 for Hallmark. The album was produced by Dave Grusin, who wrote all the wonderful arrangements of the music. James later re-released the album with two more songs. I didn’t buy the re-released version because I already had all the songs on it.
“Go Tell It On The Mountain” is one of my favorite JT Christmas songs!
I’m sure as the month wears on, there will be more posts about Christmas songs… but for now, I think we’ve gotten things off to a festive start! Hope your December has gotten off famously!
With a career spanning decades, Pat Benatar is one of rock’s leading ladies. Here’s a review of Pat Benatar’s Between A Heart and a Rock Place.
I have enjoyed Pat Benatar’s powerhouse vocals ever since I was a young girl. I was introduced to her music by FM radio and my older sister, Sarah, who happened to own a copy of Benatar’s 1980 album, Crimes of Passion, on vinyl. That album has the distinction of being the very first one I ever purchased with my own money. I bought it at a local discount store, having walked there all by myself. I took the record home and played it over and over again. Pat Benatar’s music was a big part of the soundtrack of my youth. I was excited when I saw her 2010 memoir Between a Heart and a Rock Place for sale on Amazon.com. I managed to finish it within a couple of days.
Benatar starts at the beginning, writing about her upbringing in Lindenhurst, Long Island in a close-knit Polish-Irish family. She took to music early and caught the attention of choir teachers in her local school district. Because she had an extraordinary voice from an early age, she took voice lessons. She set her sights on attending Juilliard and becoming an opera singer. Her voice was supposedly not unlike Julie Andrews’. But then Pat fell in love with her first husband, Dennis Benatar, and temporarily abandoned her music dreams in favor of a brief stint in college. She decided she’d teach sex ed.
Dennis Benatar was a draftee in the Army and when Pat married him, she became an Army wife. She was moved to South Carolina and Virginia and she eventually took jobs working in banks. She was good at the work, but still wanted to sing. After seeing Liza Minnelli perform at the Richmond Coliseum, Pat’s desire to be a singer was rekindled. She took a job as a singing waitress in Richmond. Later, when Dennis got out of the Army, they moved back to New York and Pat started singing regularly at a club called Catch A Rising Star.
It wasn’t long before Pat Benatar’s star began to rise. She found a manager and assembled a band. She recorded some songs and soon met the man who would become her star guitarist and husband, Neil Giraldo. Pat Benatar refers to him as “Spyder”. Though their relationship was initially professional, Pat eventually divorced Dennis Benatar and married Spyder. They have two daughters, Haley and Hana, and have been married since 1982.
One thing I like to do before and after I read a book is check out what other people have to say about them. Many folks on Amazon.com seemed to think Pat Benatar’s life story is dull and boring. I didn’t feel that way at all. It’s true that as rock stars go, Pat Benatar has led a pretty straight-laced lifestyle. She doesn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, or have random sex with other celebrities. She doesn’t have a lot of juicy gossip to share with readers. What she does have is a story about her time pioneering rock music as a woman. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, there weren’t a whole lot of female rock stars. Benatar was expected to be sexy and sultry, even though she wasn’t really like that. She had to deal with a lot of sexism.
Benatar writes a lot about her dealings with her first label, Chrysalis, which was co-founded by Briton Terry Ellis. I was interested in reading about Ellis because I read Ray Coleman’s 1994 book The Carpenters: The Untold Story, which revealed that Ellis had dated Karen Carpenter. Coleman wrote a lot about their relationship and why it eventually failed. I got the impression that Terry Ellis was “fun” and liked to go out on the town. Pat Benatar’s comments about Ellis were far from complimentary. They had a strictly business relationship and Ellis apparently overworked her and treated her like a sex object. He even told her that people don’t go to a Pat Benatar concert to hear her sing! What?!!
Aside from the business aspect of her music career, Benatar also writes about working with her husband, who is quite the musical genius. She comes across as very down-to-earth and family oriented. I got the sense that I would like Pat Benatar as a person. Benatar also includes color photos, which were fun to look at. I particularly enjoyed the photo of her daughters, born nine years apart. They look like they could be twins! Benatar was a very devoted mother to them and writes of getting them tickets to see Miley Cyrus, N-Sync, and other teen oriented acts. She’s charming as she explains that just like every other mom, she’s been to her share of teeny bopper concerts!
Benatar also has a special love for a place in Hawaii. She writes lovingly of Hana, a small town in Maui, where she and Spyder got married and eventually built a home. Her description of the place makes me want to visit. It sounds heavenly.
I really enjoyed Between a Heart and a Rock Place and would recommend it to anyone who likes to read memoirs about rock stars. Don’t read it expecting to read juicy gossip, though. Read it to learn about an extraordinary and dynamic woman’s rise to the top in a male oriented business. Pat Benatar is a great role model for young women. I’m proud to endorse her book.
The right music can be life-altering. Here are six artists whose music changed my life in some way…
Pat Benatar Crimes of Passion (1980)
Picture it. It’s 1981. I’m nine years old and there is still one older sister out of three living at home with me. My older sister is seventeen and has a stereo that plays vinyl. Every night, I hear her playing songs by Hall & Oates, Rose Royce, The Eagles and Pat Benatar. I am especially attracted to Pat Benatar’s voice. It’s huge, clear, and powerful. The album my sister plays is Crimes of Passion. I remember seeing the cover of it; tiny Pat is wearing a sparkly black leotard and is backed up to a barre. Her brown hair is permed and curly and she’s wearing a lot of makeup. Even though the big hit on that album is “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”, I’m attracted to deeper cuts– “Prisoner of Love” and a song called “Out-A-Touch”. I also love what Pat’s done with Kate Bush’s song, “Wuthering Heights”. At that time in my life, I had not yet been exposed to Kate Bush. I didn’t realize that the original was a lot better than Pat’s remake. I wanted my own copy of that album.
Remember, it was 1981. That was before people were so concerned about kidnappers or other dangers. My parents were very underprotective by today’s standards. I was allowed to walk to the store by myself. This was permitted even though getting to the store involved walking along a busy major highway and crossing four lanes of traffic to get to the shopping center. The shopping center had a Murphy’s Mart, which was a discount store kind of akin to K-Mart. I remember scrimping and saving up about eight dollars so I could buy my own vinyl copy of Crimes of Passion. I remember the pride I felt in that accomplishment. It was my very first music purchase.
Pat Benatar sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”.
Years later, I still own a copy of that album, though now it’s in a digital format. I still really admire Pat Benatar’s talent. I love a lot of her early rock performances, though I was even more impressed when in 1991, she released True Love, an album that showcases her jazz and blues chops. I wish she’d do another album like that one.
Kate Bush The Dreaming (1982)
A couple of years after I purchased my own copy of Crimes of Passion, I was hanging out with another sister; this one is eleven years my senior. This sister is also a music lover, but her tastes are definitely more artistic and rock oriented than the other sister’s. We share a room in my parents’ house, because this sister is only home on breaks and frankly she and the other sister would be at each other’s throats if they had to share a room. This sister also has a stack of vinyl records and a stereo. And one day, she’s playing music that, to me, was both foreign and wonderful.
I asked her who the singer was. My sister explained that it was Kate Bush, a British singer who had just come out with a new album called, The Dreaming. My sister had seen Kate Bush perform on Top Of The Pops when we lived in England a few years prior. She was impressed, so when she saw Kate Bush had a new album out, she took a chance and bought it. I remember being completely enchanted by songs from that album, particularly “Night Of The Swallow”, which stuck in my head for years until I finally purchased my own copy of The Dreaming on cassette.
“Night of the Swallow”
After I bought that album in 1989, I became a full-fledged Kate Bush fanatic…
James Taylor Flag (1979)
I could write an ode to just about all of James Taylor’s albums. They have all meant a lot to me. It was 1979’s Flag, though, that really got me hooked on his music. The same sister who was into Kate Bush had a copy of Flag on vinyl and I remember hearing her play “Up On The Roof”, Taylor’s gorgeous cover of a song written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. I remember being affected by the warmth of James Taylor’s vocals. There was something about his voice that was so comforting and moving to me. I also loved the arrangement, which made use of strings and piano.
James Taylor sings “Up On The Roof”.
I bought my own copy of Flag in 1990 and remember listening to it a lot in college, especially during my freshman year. It consoled me through a lot of tough days.
Alison Krauss and Union Station New Favorite (2001)
Alison Krauss is one of those artists I used to hear a lot about when I was growing up, but I never bothered to sit down and listen to her music. Until the last fifteen years or so, she was primarily known in bluegrass circles for playing fiddle and having a beautiful, pure voice. Of course, now she’s a huge star who’s even recorded with Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s legendary front man. I think I’d heard her sing with Lyle Lovett on his 1998 double album, Step Inside This House and was impressed. So in 2002, when I still had a membership to Columbia House and had some free CDs coming, I purchased her solo album Forget About It and her 2001 album with her band, Union Station, New Favorite. I loved both of the CDs and quickly started adding to my Alison Krauss collection. I think I have just about all of her stuff, now. But it was New Favorite that got me there.
Alison Krauss and Union Station sing “The Lucky One”.
Lyle Lovett Joshua Judges Ruth (1992)
I remember the very first time I heard Lyle Lovett sing. It was in 1996 and I was in Yerevan, Armenia at a gathering of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers. The married couple who was hosting the get-together had turned on some music. I wasn’t paying too much attention to it, until my ears caught the chorus of Lyle Lovett’s song, “Since The Last Time”. The song starts off kind of slow, then builds into an upbeat number with bluesy harmonies and lyrics about losing touch with loved ones… until the last time somebody died. When I got back to the United States in 1997, I started buying Lyle Lovett’s music so I could find that song. As I recall, I had bought most of his available albums when I finally stumbled across Joshua Judges Ruth. Since then, I’ve found plenty of songs by Lyle Lovett that I love… but this one was the very first.
Lyle Lovett and “Since The Last Time”.
Stevie Wonder Songs In The Key of Life (1976)
Anybody who was around in the 70s and 80s knows Stevie Wonder. He was everywhere during that time period. I discovered his album, Songs In The Key of Life in the late 1990s. It was my oldest sister who introduced it to me when I heard his beautiful song, “As” playing on the radio. I had heard the song many times, but that was the first time I’d ever really listened to the lyrics closely. I started buying all his early albums until I finally found Songs In The Key of Life, a magnificent two volume set with songs that had healing lyrics. I can honestly say that Stevie Wonder’s music helped save me from clinical depression. If that’s not life changing, I don’t know what is.
Stevie Wonder sings “As”.
Of course, I can think of plenty of other songs and artists who have changed my life in some way. The six artists profiled in this article are the ones who have been pivotal to me… at least today as I sit here thinking about it. These are the artists who actually inspired an obsession… I was compelled to buy their music and I still love what they do years later. Can you think of any artists or albums that changed your life? Leave a comment.
