Holiday Survival Kit

Save Thanksgiving with the healing power of music

Outside of Arlo Guthrie and Adam Sandler, there’s not really an established canon of Thanksgiving music. A search for “Thanksgiving songs” turns up a lot of random selections with “Thank(s)” or “Turkey” in the title (Bob Dylan’s “Turkey Chase,” an instrumental fiddle jam from the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, is not a Thanksgiving song, as much ass as it may kick). And fair enough - unlike Christmas or Halloween, there’s not really a Thanksgiving season for “Thanksgiving music” to sprawl out into. Just a single, distilled day, and one oft-seasoned with at least a dollop of logistical stress and/or overstimulation. Who needs a soundtrack to all that?

But there is a mood you can foster. Maybe that’s a moving target and everyone’s is different. Thanksgiving is a holiday rooted in the transitional time between seasons, and to me those seasons map to two genres of music in particular: autumnal folk and wintery jazz. That’s the stuff I want to have on while I’m steeling myself for non-stop face time and/or freaking out over a pie crust. So with that in mind, I’ve got a few pulls from the shelf to recommend; records you could throw on while you contemplate the season, regardless of your plans or lack thereof.

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Greg Brown - The Live One

Put it on: in the morning, with your coffee, to get in the familial spirit.

Eternally and criminally underrated folk lifer Greg Brown put out this live recording in 1995, and it’d be a dark horse candidate on my “favorite live albums” list (with a hat tip to my old friend Eric for putting me onto this one way back when, via a massively influential mp3 swap). Recorded solo at a small (and since demolished) club in Traverse City, Michigan, the intimate live environment allows Brown’s signature midwestern wit and gravel-soul baritone to fill the room.

This whole record is a great cold morning background album, conversational and often bracingly funny (“I Don’t Want to Have a Nice Day” and the opener “Just By Myself” in particular). But if you were to choose one standout cut, it would have to be this version of his 1988 song “Canned Goods” - a love letter to holidays spent with his sturdy, doting grandmother and her root cellar full of magical jars that could transport you back to summer. He breaks up the song’s choruses with a winding yarn, told over hypnotically arpeggiating C and G chords, about visits to his family’s southern Iowa farm growing up.

His childhood memories are Joycean in their equally specific and familiar quality: his mother trying to put on makeup while driving on rural, hilly roads, being smothered by aunts at an age when his pre-teen sexuality was just coming online, running off into the woods with a group of cousins, only to be lured back by the smell of fried chicken when it got dark (except it only appeared dark to the people looking out from inside the house, it was “adult dark”). It’s a delightful, hilarious, and heartfelt monologue, a slideshow carousel of warm family moments wedged into the middle of an already lovely song.

The Roches - The Roches

Put it on: while preheating the oven

Let’s cook. The Roches, the 1979 self-titled debut from these three sisters from Park Ridge, New Jersey (they’ll introduce themselves to you properly on the album’s first track “We”), is a bonafide American original. A folksy collection brimming with perspective, humor, and life, its beating heart is in the three uniquely raw voices and how tightly and divinely they weave together; at times brash and punchy, like on the breezy “Mr. Sellack” (in which one of the sisters begs an old boss for her shitty job back) at others celestially-braided and iridescent, like on the frosty working class stunner “Quitting Time,” which you can almost hear condensation coming off of.

If you know this album, chances are you know “Hammond Song,” its most enduring song and one of the finest pieces of music ever put to tape, full stop. I don’t know why I think of it as a Thanksgiving song, but I do, and its songwriting does tread in thematically relevant waters in terms of family and expectations. “Hammond Song,” tells a familiar story - a girl decides to follow a guy out of town, her relatives disapprove. Written by Maggie, the youngest of the Roche sisters, the verses rotate perspective, giving the tale a prismatic, Rashomon effect. One verse is sung in harmony, a Greek chorus of family members warning the song’s main character not to “go with that fella,” that she’s “on the wrong track.” The next is sung solo by Maggie, the girl herself, as she follows through on her plan, goes down to Hammond, does as she pleases.

Produced in restrained fashion by the great Robert Fripp, who also lends his signature Frippertronics guitar sound to a gorgeously slippery solo that punctuates the song’s final third, “Hammond Song” contains no lessons or resolutions. We don’t know if things work out with the girl and her fella in the end. What we get instead at the song’s climax is a lyrical stunner, a perfectly succinct meditation on leavings and losses sung in achingly poignant harmony:

“They say we meet again on down the line /
where is on down the line? How far away?

Families can be tricky, unconditional love is not always easy to conjure, accepting people close to you for what they are or are not can be difficult - especially when they’ve gone off-script and decided to throw their life away with some punk from Hammond, Louisiana. Let the genetically pre-determined charisma of the Roche sisters stand as a testament to the benefits on putting in the work to keep your family close.

Charlie Haden & Hank Jones - Steal Away

Put it on: for the calm before the storm

Steal Away, a 1995 collection of traditional church music magnificently revived on piano and bass by jazz icons Hank Jones and Charlie Haden, feels and sounds like foundational holiday music. These familiar melodies, most played at an elegiac pace, stick to your bones and warm your spirit, even as many of them also harken back to a more, uh, problematic era of American life.

The two veterans sound as if they are in communion with old ghosts. Jones, who grew up in Mississippi as the son of a deacon in the Baptist church, plays like a musician reading his own DNA, while Haden’s mournfully expressive bass lines anchor these sparse and reverent arrangements in firm soil. I have never regretted putting this album on in any context, but it can be an especially powerful tonic when you’re feeling world-weary or stewing in a negative headspace. Listen and be at peace, baby.

Joni Mitchell - Hejira (live)

Put it on: when people start showing up

I’d been waiting all year for The Asylum Years (1976–1980), the newest release from Joni Mitchell’s ongoing Archives series - box sets that contain her remastered albums along with additional discs of demos and live recordings - which finally dropped last month. I was eager to get my hands on it because this set contains unreleased bonus material from 1976’s Hejira, my favorite Joni album, as well as additional live recordings from the ensuing Shadows and Light tour, which featured the insanely stacked backing band of Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, and Don Alias (a powerful who’s who of 70’s jazz and fusion).

Hejira has always felt to me like Joni’s winter album, a chilly travelogue chock full of knotty interiority, a fogged up window in a roadside cafe. In these fleshed out live recordings, like the ones from this 1979 set in Queens, its carefully-crafted compositions take on a sprawling, spontaneous quality, bolstered by Joni’s all-star accompaniment. In this live take of album highlight “Amelia,” a tribute to Amelia Earhart and, by proxy, to the bold expanses of femininity, an album-faithful rendition is upended in its back half by god-mode Pat Metheny. His signature electric guitar sound, a gossamer web of chorus and reverb, creeps in under Joni and hoists the whole plane into the heavens, ensconcing the song’s final verses in peals and rays of countermelody, expanding and contracting as needed to fill any cold corners and empty space with warm and radiant sound.

Keith Jarrett - Sun Bear Concerts

Put this on: when you start eating

KJ has long been go-to dinnertime music for me, especially his solo live stuff which can sit serenely in the background of a conversation and step forward to fill any eating-induced silences. But I’ve always been a Köln Concert or Bremen / Lausanne guy and had not really dug into any of the Sun Bear stuff until earlier this year.

The five-volume box set, made up of live solo piano performances from a Japanese tour in November 1976, was a revelation to me. The mood and tone of each night is distinct, but taken together these separate improvisational pieces make up a tapestry of playful, mystic, melancholy joy. Nobody did it like Keith in terms of his ability to construct melody of thin air; listening to Sun Bear, you get the sense, can feel it in real time, that all of this beautiful music grew like crystalline structures out of one small idea.

Rachel’s - Music for Egon Schiele

Put it on: for dessert

The second album by 90’s Neo-classical outfit Rachel’s, Music for Egon Schiele is an evocative and elegant song cycle that would make for excellent pie and coffee music, as things start to wind down and you (or your guests) start making eyes with the exits.

Performing as a trio of viola, cello, and piano, the Louisville group originally conceived this collection of searching, stately chamber music as the score to a theater production about the life of Austrian painter Egon Schiele (I took a class about fin de siècle Vienna in college and really took to Schiele’s angular, expressionist portraits. So. Art guy over here).

The connected pieces unfurl like fine silk, a frozen river of color and texture with a sub current of restrained emotion running just beneath the surface. Rachel’s would go on to expand their palette with more bombastic post-rock influences on their next few albums, but to me the airy balance of elements on Egon Schiele is perfect. Wes Anderson vibes, the sonic equivalent of a handmade doll-house.

Bill Frisell - Ghost Town

Put it on: for a nightcap

One of my favorite Frisell records is also something of an outlier in his decades-spanning catalogue - a quiet Americana affair where the guitar virtuoso plays all of the instruments (guitars, banjos, and basses), and the mood remains firmly nocturnal and introspective (as opposed to other Frisell efforts from this era which contain on-a-dime tonal shifts and wider spheres of instrumentation and influence).

Ghost Town spotlight’s Frisell’s sparse, lyrical guitar arrangements, offering takes on a wide swath of American classics that includes the Carter Family, Hank Williams, and George Gershwin, peppered between memorable originals like the above title track. This is sad cowboy music, as if the album title left any doubt - with many of the songs taking on a mournful and monastic quality. But their cumulative effect is also one of relaxation and reflection. A lightened load, a loosened belt. Sometimes, at the end of certain days in particular, that lonesome feeling can come as a relief.

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No time to get a mix together or assemble odds and ends - on a pretty obvious deadline with this one. Happy and peaceful holidays to all ✌️.