I’m leaving it under the tree!
Kickin off Christmas with a brand new song!
Today we released our second Christmas song as a band (but our sixth collectively!). It’s called “Under the Tree and it is still quite warm from the oven. Can you feel it? It’s about going home for Christmas after you’ve moved away, and how things feel different, although still fadedly beautiful.
I grew up in Omaha and that experience has inspired multiple songs now, including “Another Christmas at Home” by Eux Autres (which is the much funnier version of the story) and it also inspired the lyrics for this one.
Omaha gets very colorless and bleak this time of year, so people really pull out all the stops with decorations—especially the plastic blow-mold snowmen, Santas and nativity scenes. It creates an eerie glow all over the city: dirty snow, opaque white sky, bitter cold, and these incandescent cheesy statues on every block, saying, "hey now, let’s be merry, ok?
Brian also grew up in a sort of bleak town (Tacoma) and as we worked together on this song, we talked a lot about our experiences of going home again for the holidays after we had just moved away. How, when we’d come home from the bars in our twenties, we would find ourselves drawn to the glow of the Christmas tree. We’d sit there, a little drunk, staring at the lights. Feeling like we were still children longing for that Christmas “magic,” and yet also like adults who saw the painful limitations of our hometowns. Those towns are so deep in the fiber of our beings that even our Christmases in our adult home together still carry powerful echoes of those childhood Christmases and our first years returning home.
Structurally, the song is built around the narrator’s longing for the old feelings of magic and regretting how easily she cast off her origins for the bigger “shiny things”. And then, Brian’s voice comes in for the bridge, the booming ghost of Christmas Past with all of its insistent cheer, and the narrator wants to feel it but can’t quite give herself over completely.
Brian wrote most of the music and played almost all the instruments. The wonderful drummer Eric Eagle did the drums and our favorite exiled Englishman, Mr. Martin Feveyear, mixed it. It’s available on bandcamp [link] today and will come out in a week or two on itunes et al—you’ll be the first to know, of course!
We hope you’re having a good start to the holiday. Please do check out the “24” Christmas compilation on wiaiwya to find our “Flannel Pajamas” featured!
Love,
Heather and Brian
LYRICS:
Strings of lights
Frosted nights at the fireside
Bundled up with a cup of time
I never knew the magic was you
While I chased all the shiny things
Diamond rings in the skyline
When we were young, reckless and dumb,
The gifts were all free
Now I’m tired and I’m leaving it under the tree tonight
Yesterday went the way of the firelight
Now I’m here and the candle is low
Dreaming away
That Christmas Day could just fill me with something new
Without you this place is so cold
Twinkling lights / magical nights / Merry Christmas
Paper and bows / frost on your toes / Merry Christmas
Songs in the air / friends everywhere / Merry Christmas
The holiday is here…