Music Monday: Christmas in July

Ok, this is not actually the track I wanted. Brave Combo is a North Texas based band with a following in Japan. A while back they did a Christmas album. As the story goes:

We never considered recording a Christmas album before. Everyone had already heard most of the famous songs enough for a lifetime and the challenge to make them fresh would be immense. Plus, Brave Combo walks a pretty thin line between novelty and serious anyway. A Christmas album would just never have Crossed our minds. However, in early 1991, during our second trip to Japan, a man from P-Vine Records asked us if we would be interested in the idea. “What, an album of Japanese Christmas music?” I asked. “No, there are no Japanese Christmas songs,” he replied, which meant to me that he wanted an album of standard melodies and songs that Americans hear and sing every winter. It seems that Christmas is a big holiday in Japan as well, stripped of all religious significance: a time of indulgent buying and gift-giving (a Japanese art) when Jesus Christ is acknowledged, but no more important an icon than Frosty, the Snowman. The idea was definitely interesting. We could choose a bunch of our favorite Christmas songs, mutate them into new shapes and release them in Japan only. Plus P-Vine had big plans. They would re-release it every year and perhaps it would become a classic. If the album came out too corny for jaded western ears, it wouldn’t matter. No one in the U.S. would even have to know about it.

So I had hoped to post their track “Christmas in July,” but it’s just not out there as far as I can tell.

In Closing: race relations; common sense on Social Security; eggs; on our shrinking freedoms; some good news for a change; and “Tiny Rat Cocktail Parties.”