Christmas albums still have a bit of a stigma among fans of higher-cred artists. It can be difficult, first, to overcome the expectation that they’re either cash grabs or sops to sentimentality, and secondly, to come up with an original take on seasonal music, even with the best intentions. Should an artist deign to embark on a full-on Christmas music tour, suspicions might be even more aroused. What, other than opportunism, could be the reason for that much devotion to the season?
So God bless the occasional singer-songwriter like Ben Folds who sees Christmas as a way into writing the kinds of songs he would usually write, not just for the purposes of a new album but a proper concert outing. His recently wrapped Tis the Season tour was a veritable Christmas Star in shining a light on the right path to undertake doing this kind of thing, as was the album of mostly original material that precipitated it, 2024’s archly titled “Sleigher.” Folds brings to the concert state a satisfyingly holistic approach to holiday music, give or take a couple of “ho’s.”
Even before Folds recorded “Sleigher,” there was a body of solid evidence that he was the right man for the task. That was the fact that he’d already written and recorded a number of songs that mention Christmas or the holidays either prominently or incidentally — prior tunes that, combined with the “Sleigher” material, easily added up to a full set, before getting to any non-seasonal numbers thrown in as bonus tracks for the encore. Most notable of these, as any fan would know, is his late ’90s hit “Brick,” a ballad about taking one’s girlfriend to get an abortion on Dec. 26. Once you’ve written that as your first “Christmas song,” you’ve established a fine outer parameter for how far you’re willing to stretch the genre, such as it is.
At one of two sold-out appearances at L.A.’s new Blue Note Cafe, where he was among the few non-jazz artists booked thus far in the young life of that club, Folds and his combo naturally performed “Brick,” along with a few other pre-existing holiday songs that tended toward that outer edge, like the novelty songs “Bizarre Christmas Incident” and the indelicately titled “Bitch Went Nutz.” But being subversive about Christmas is not actually really his thing, or his current thing, anyway. And the “Sleigher” album, despite its irreverent name, tends more toward the center, with earnest songs that aren’t afraid to at least skim sentiment, if not indulge in it, even if the sentiment is loneliness. In the overall course of the set, Folds was able to play Christmas for comedy, but more often than not came up for something more earnest, all the way to covering Mel Torme and Vince Guaraldi without apology.
Right at the outset, he explained why he came to see the season as a meaningful setting for original songs.
“I like a good rhyme, and that’s why I guess I’ve bothered to write a whole Christmas album, plus a few other songs in my past,” he told the Blue Note audience. “There were Christmas songs and a whole slew of songs that mention it” in his catalog, “and I think the reason is because it is so all-pervasive once a year. It is such a bully of a holiday — it takes over everything. It’s the holiday that’s too big to fail. And it’s the same shit every year. It’s the same colors, the same sights, sounds, songs, everything… same ads… And that’s the gift.”
He would have to further explain that, and did.
“Because when everything is the same and it just feels like a continuation of yesterday, which was 2024, and the day before that was Christmas 2023, the only thing that’s changed is you. And I think that’s the reason I’ve been interested in the topic. You could be at at dinner at Christmas and realize that only two days in Christmas time ago, there were a couple people that used to be here that are not here anymore. And then you’re sitting and talking to nephews who weren’t even here what seems like a couple days ago, and now they’re bald and telling you about their bankruptcy. It’s crazy. So, by having that as a marker, it makes it a rhyme. That’s what a rhyme is for. It is at the end of a phrase or a couplet to sound the same. Everything seems like it ought to be same, but it’s a little bit different; you actually learned something in the last 10 syllables.”
Ben Folds at the Blue Note
Major Caldwell IV
With that, he went into “Christmas Time Rhyme,” which, as he explained, was originally supposed to be the title track of his holiday album last year, before “I thought of ‘Sleigher’ and I thought, ‘Man, I gotta use that. That’s better.’” It’s a lovely song tracing those noble thoughts about cyclical thoughts and time speeding up and slowing down and putting us back down where we were, the same and different. And it also puts that poetry aside to cut to the chase: “Precious moments like these, they mean the world to me
/ Listen, you’re all fuckin’ freaks, but we’re family / So we do what it takes to be in one place, if just for a day.”
Along with the more familiar cover chestnuts that also peppered his set, Folds introduced his audience to “You Don’t Have to Be a Santa Claus (When Christmas Comes Around),” a fairly obscure oldie dating back at least to 1955, when the Mills Brothers recorded it. (Folds said it was written during the Great Depression.) “I thought it might be relevant these days because it’s about how you might think about helping someone out on other days besides Christmas, and that at the time was a controversial statement, like it is now, to help someone else out.”
Closer to home, he got at what it’s like to be truly solitary at Christmas — or at least other than the companionship of a pet — with his original “Maurice,” written in Nashville in “one of those really everything-looks-the-same sort of suburban neighborhoods that’s not that inspiring. And all the neighbors had the same exact Christmas decorations in their front yard — an inflatable Santa that’s about two stories high and an inflatable reindeer next door; every House down the street almost had the same thing in the front of the yard. Maurice fucking hated the reindeer. He said so many inappropriate things to them in their reindeer language… Our yard was right next to I-40, which comes out here too. And Maurice would dig holes in the snow, and I sort of imagined he was trying to dig a path out.”
The funnier songs of the past had their own stories. “Bitch Went Nutz” was about a young, conservative lawyer on the rise inviting a liberal barista to be his date at the office Christmas party, only to have her wind up in a screaming political argument with his right-wing colleagues. “Bizarre Christmas Incident” was written as his first misguided attempt at an end-titles theme for “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”; he regaled the Blue Note audience with the tale of how horror-stricken the music supervisor was when he turned it in: “Ben Folds, it’s a fucking kids movie. I’m not showing this to Ron Howard!” He then followed that in concert with the much more appropriate song he turned around in the next 24 hours that successfully made it into the movie, “Lonely Christmas Eve.”
Most plaintive was a song he co-wrote with Nick Hornby, “Picture Window,” about the celebrated novelist and his wife spending New Year’s Eve with their chronically ill son in a London hospital room. The refrain: “You know what hope is? / Hope is a bastard, hope is a liar, a cheat and a tease / Hope comes near you / Kick its backside / Got no place in days like these.” The holiday season doesn’t get any more sobering than that, notwithstanding the Blue Note’s drink minimum.
What do you do after that full spectrum of holiday fare than sing “The Christmas Song”? Along with, come the encore, unseasonal chestnuts from his own catalog, like “Philosophy,” from his more keyboard-pounding Ben Folds Era, before circling back to Charlie Brown with “Christmas Time Is Here,” sung by duet partner Lindsey Craft, to send the audience out into the non-chill on a note of buzzed tranquility.
Folds remains one of our most reliable songwriters, so it’s not surprising that his Christmas material would be as solid as the rest — and that he, unlike most of his contemporaries, would recognize that the mass audience’s hunger for seasonal songs is something worth sating. Because, if nothing else, it does represent a twelfth of our lives, give or take. He has a song called “Sleepwalking Through Christmas,” but it’s to his credit he doesn’t sleepwalk through the task of coming up with this stuff. Here’s hoping for “Sleigher 2” and a perennial touring season.
