O Holy Night - Andrew Bird
The announcement video for this EP is in black and white, and this song is playing, and Andrew Bird doesn’t seem very pleased with himself. He’s wearing a santa hat with “Naughty” embroidered across the trim in cheap-looking cursive.
There’s a lot of sighing.
“A Christmas record, really? Now? Now in your career you want to make a Christmas record?” he says, leaning on his piano, badly-animated snowflakes fluttering over his face. It’s all in a tone of sardonic apology. “Sorry… Oops?”
You can watch a YouTube playlist of every song on HARK!. Each video in the playlist consists of the exact same footage of Andrew Bird pretending to read a book, chroma keyed over a seasonal stock image. Heavily pixellated snowflakes and icicles are garishly superimposed over the frames. It’s in the same kitschy aesthetic space as temporary profile photo frames and mid-2000s iMovie effects.
It reminds me of a very prescient Brian Eno quote that has floated across my feeds recently (e.g. in The Beauty of Degraded Art):
Whatever you find weird, ugly, or nasty about a medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished as soon as they can be avoided.
He wrote that in 1995. We have vaporwave now, so.
I do feel like it’s a bit of a weird visual choice for Andrew Bird, though, given that his album is full of carefully-plucked violin strings and ethereal whistling, not irreverent references and glitchy samples. (This is no Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!) He seems to feel like he’s degrading his art, making a Christmas album, and not in a beautiful way.
I don’t know. In interviews he said that he was enjoying the Charlie Brown Christmas album* and found himself wanting to spend a few days in the studio playing nostalgic jazz with his friends. That’s so reasonable! It’s okay to do things for fun.
Cherishing unsophisticated things,
- Tessa
*Tangent: I learned that
A Charlie Brown Christmas was originally credited just to “Vince Guaraldi”, since he kept abysmal records of his session players. Rude, Vince. Anyway, later versions have been credited to “Vince Guaraldi Trio”. While all of the songs were performed by three musicians, there isn’t any single consensus Trio; you’re hearing at least two different drummers and bassists on the album. (It is still a point of contention as to whether more than five people contributed to the tracks because, again, abysmal records.) Anyway, thank you for subscribing to music facts! Appreciate your session musicians!