Okay… okay… I know you’re saying “Christmas in June, Ben’s off his rocker,” well that may be true but in this case let me explain. Last December, the folks at Sirius/XM Radio’s Kids Place Live station requested that artists played on their station (which I’m happy to say includes my friends and I) send in a recorded greeting of some kind saying why you like Christmas. So, together with my trusty engineer, Andy Pinkham at Mortal Music, we came up with an NPR like piece describing a Christmas I had as a kid. The gist of the piece was that I lived in NYC near the “A” train, some bus lines, a pizza place and other sources of noise. On this one Christmas Eve, snow was falling and accumulating and before you knew it everything was quiet! In classic NPR like fashion we included all the noises and then had them stop.
And now you ask, “so Ben, Christmas is still months and months away, why are you bringing this up?” Weeellll… I’m expecting to get a similar request next December and I want to be ready. Our Ninth Annual Christmas Extravaganza at the Regent Theatre is also scheduled for Saturday, December 11th and since we started with the First Annual Christmas Extravaganza, we’ve been asked if we had any Christmas recordings. The answer has always been “no.” The plan this year is to be able to say “yes.”
If everything goes according to plan, we should be starting in on some holiday recordings fairly soon. I’ve written a Christmas song and we’ll pick some favorite songs we’ve played over our run of holiday shows. If all goes well, we’ll have a holiday EP disc available late fall.
Christmas in June? I hope so!
And remember… if you’re going to jingle, jingle all the way!
b.
ps. Check out my facebook page to listen to the piece I recorded!
