Search - Christine Lavin & the Mistletones :: Runaway Christmas Tree

One of the wittiest and most insightful contemporary singer-songwriters, Christine Lavin, sets aside her customary focus on interpersonal relationships in the bewildering modern era to create a characteristic mixture of irreverent and genuine winter holiday songs. Discovering that she "just couldn?t find a good Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/ Chanukah/Ramadan/Boxing Day album," she rounded up seven other vocalists, a sackful of humorous, offbeat and sometimes moving seasonal songs, a couple of original stories, and created this lighthearted a cappella alternative to the usual cloying Christmas-season songbook. Inspired by the vocal techniques of Sol "Roundman" Weber," Christine enlisted singer-songwriter Julie ("From a Distance") Gold, Emily Bindiger and Margaret Dorn from The Accidentals, the harmony octet that won the 2002 National A Cappella Competition, Ervin Drake (author of standards "Good Morning, Heartache" and "It Was a Very Good Year"), actor/director/singer David Lutken (a veteran of Broadway and Off-Broadway), R&B/gospel singer Gregory Clark, and artist/vocalist Andrea Vuocolo in this "all vocals/all ages" project (which Bindiger produced). This CD contains tales of Christmas wishes gone wrong ("Polkadot Pancakes"), choral complaints and celebrations regarding seasonal food ("Scalloped Potatoes" and "Tacobel Canon," respectively), and a snippet of what sounds like munchkins on helium ("Elves"). The title track is a bedtime story Lavin wrote to explain why people decorate their Christmas trees (to weight them down so they won?t escape, of course). Interspersed with these unorthodox holiday excursions are a handful of more conventional hymns to the peace and joy of December ? the lovely "Dona Nobis Pacem," "A New Year?s Round," "Lamb and Lion," and "Allelujah/Amen." There?s also the slightly twisted "A Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Chanukah/Ramadan/Boxing Day Song," an express-lane version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" (retitled "Th 12 Dys f Chrstms") and "The All-Purpose Carol" (which ends with a resounding "Oy, mon!"). "Try NOT to sing along," challenges Lavin. "That?s the hard part."