C'est Noel! My 2013 Holiday Mix Is Ready for Your Review

It's Thanksgiving Day, and with Christmas now less than four weeks away, I'm pleased to report that my annual holiday mix for 2013 is completed and ready to share! It's called C'est Noel!, and this morning I posted it on the "LATEST" page of my holiday music website along with this year's special bonus mix, The NOW Sound of Christmas! Both will remain posted for streaming and download for a limited time only, so please be sure to visit the website soon.

C'est Noel! consists of 35 tracks and runs just under 80 minutes. As usual, it's an eclectic mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, and I've tried to include a wide variety of music and other noise to both please and offend as many listeners as possible.* Over the next several weeks, I'm planning to post a few thoughts about each of the 35 tracks on this blog. As in previous years, I'll look at several tracks each day until done, with a day or two off here and there and occasional posts on other relevant or irrelevant topics. I'll start at the beginning, but each day's post will run in reverse chronological order so that the final list will flow from Track 35 to Track 1 rather than jumping a couple of steps back and forth within each post.  I hope these posts will help give you a little useful background about the tracks I've selected for this year's mix.

 

If you're on my holiday mailing list, you should be receiving a CD version of C'est Noel! sometime during the next week or ten days. With increasing numbers of people abandoning CDs in favor of digital .mp3 downloads, I gave serious consideration to distributing this year's mix electronically rather than preparing physical CDs. Such a switch would be easier and far less expensive for me, but there's something rather special about receiving holiday greetings by old-fashioned mail and to holding a CD package in one's hand with the artwork and track list and all, so I'm mailing them out again this year.

 

I hope you enjoy this year's mix, and that it adds a little color and fun to your holiday celebrations. Joyeaux Noel!

 

 

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*If you're not familiar with my annual holiday mixes, I typically add a number of "offbeat" tracks to each release, including a few holiday horrors that many listeners consider to lie somewhere between amusing and excrutiating. Children seem to love them, as do many childish adults. They also tend to make many of the other tracks seem ever so much better by contrast. Check out this track for example. (The "tune" may take a moment to load.)