Ty's FIRST 5 - Christmas Songs 2020!
Most Friday mornings are like Christmas morning for me: I wake up & excitedly fire up my playlist of the new music releases that magically loaded onto my phone, overnight! But this Friday morning, I woke up in the mood for a very specific kind of music.
Throw it back to tiny-Ty in Sioux City, IA…the day after Thanksgiving wasn’t about Black Friday sales (we had like 3 stores and it was WAY too cold to stand in lines). It was about putting up a tree, setting out my mom’s Terry Redlin village, stringing lights & hanging mistletoe! As we decorated for the holidays as I know them, we listened to the first album I can remember: Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers Once Upon a Christmas
That’s the most-significant album in my life. Its fun to get to share it on this post. From the first notes of Dolly singing on “I Believe in Santa Claus,” it feels like love and Christmas and it makes the very tumultuous world around us feel like it can still be as simple and safe, like it was when I was home on Driftwood Lane.
What’s crazy, is that this album felt classic when I first heard it (and certainly now), but it was actually BRAND NEW when I heard it for the first time in 1984! Which just reminds me of how important these new songs can be. So today, I’m starting your Christmas playlist with my favorite new holiday releases!
“Feelin’ Like Christmas” - Corri English & Elizabeth Lyons
This song is first on my list for several reasons, and primarily because it has been making my house feel like the holidays since July! A Dolly and Kenny became tradition for me, I know that Feelin Like Christmas will be the song that takes my kids right back to that living room that they sprinted to each Christmas morning in Nashville. I hope they’ll also think of that room on so many Christmas Eve’s, when it was packed with family - my father-in-law and 7-year-old picking up guitars to form the band “Rad & Granddad,” the cousins stepping up to the hearth and showcasing one of their talents, and my wife leading the matching pajama parade to bed so that Santa could arrive. Two-year-old Bash is already singing “falalala feelin’ like Christmas’ to us, this year, and I’m excited to be adding a new stocking to our mantle in anticipation of my first baby-girl (just weeks away)!
You’re invited inside that living room, here’s a pre-pandemic behind-the-scenes with Corri and her friends Elizabeth Lyons and Danny Myrek bringing Feelin’ Like Christmas to life! This song is not only the perfect vibe for decorating a tree or cutting out gingerbread cookies (with Shugie or Memaw) - it offers that all-important bit of Christmas-song magic - every classic has at least one line that kids from 1 to 92 can sing along to! And sing-alongs are what keep it ‘Falalala Feelin’ Like Christmas!’
LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC: “Feelin' Like Christmas”
“Merry Married Christmas” - Maddie & Tae
Maddie & Tae are part of the story of my evolving Christmas story. A few years ago, I was in a rollover car accident on a road trip with my previous morning show. My friend, Chuck - seated beside me in the rear seat of a suburban that hydroplaned off the side of an interstate - (lived, recovered but) broke his spine and fractured his skull. The others in the vehicle were all taken on stretchers to the hospital and very banged up. Somehow, I was able to crawl out of the now-swampy vehicle in a flooded median in Missippi with barely a scratch. It is still a reality check every time I see a the first picture that I took with Corri and Radley when I finally made it home to Nashville, a few days later. Three smiling faces on our living room couch, huddled together. And I never fail to think “what if I hadn’t been able to see how this story plays out.” That picture would be much emptier. Not to mention the Christmases that have come after…adding another smiling face in Sebastian, and now a new-comer that will be in our photo next Christmas.
When the members of my show were recovering, Maddie & Tae were two of the first people to step up and say “can we help?” They came to the studio and hosted the morning show for us, without hesitation. This isn’t a tragic memory for me, its a reassuring and inspiring one. But I’m also very grateful to these two for making me feel like the family of Nashville was immediately there in my time of need. And I’m so excited to watch them see so much success in the last year - not just #1 hits, but also the opportunity to start to see how their story plays out. They are both married now, and celebrating the holidays in a whole new way. You’re gonna love the way that this song conveys that excitement and holiday spirit (even more special because its written by the duo and Tae’s new husband, Josh!)
This being a special list, I’m gonna add a bonus track. Check out “Holly Jolly Christmas” - to me, it’s so reminiscent of Dolly! (Oh, and the whole album: We Need Christmas)
LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC: “Merry Married Christmas”
“Little St. Nick” - Lady A
Lady A crushed it on Christmas back in 2012 with the original release of On This Winter’s Night and now they’ve gone Deluxe! This means extra songs, and the one I was most excited to see on the list is another staple of my childhood. Along with Kenny & Dolly, I had a lot of Beach Boys in my life - including Christmas. I’m currently trying to picture someone cranking this song up and then just NOT bouncing through the house. It must be literally impossible (try it) to walk casually, or sit still with this song burnin it up on your HomePod.
Lady tackles those HIGH HIGH (male) vocals that were part of any Beach Boys harmony…plus those digging-deep low-end “run run reindeer” lines! As much as I LOVE their rendition of “Let It Snow” I might have a new starting point for the Deluxe version of the album!
LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC: “Little St. Nick”
“12 Days of Christmas” - Pentatonix
Outside of a lyric, my favorite piece of music is harmonies - even ahead of a killer guitar lick or funky trumpet. And you’d be hard pressed to find a more harmonic type of music than what we hear at the holidays…but even then, Pentatonix stand out from basically everybody! One of the coolest moments for me was toward the end of a visit with Pentatonix in NYC, where I threw a random note out there and they hopped in with the harmonies. I wouldn’t have made the tryouts, but it was my studio so they were kind enough to indulge me (if you scour TyBentli.com there may be a little piece of that on a video posted here). Similarly, every Christmas you can hear me screeching away at the top of my lungs to join in the insane vocals - both lyrical and musical - that this acapella group delivers through my speakers. And they’ve done it again!
Even as a guy who prefers a groovy, upbeat holiday hit…my top pick for songs off of the new Pentatonix album, We Need A Little Christmas, hits right out of the gate with the insanely dynamic “12 Days of Christmas.” Remember how this song always starts to drag about the time you’re singing ‘5 golden rings’ for the third time and realize there are still 4 *&^%!# days of Christmas left…. Good luck getting bored with this! It ends and you’re like “What! Already?” Remember this is all VOICES (not instruments). The wild turns in harmonies, time-cadence, and arrangements goes next-level when you are hit the synthed-out 8th day of Christmas. If it weren’t for “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” in 2nd position, I’d never make it past track 1!
LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC: "12 Days of Christmas”
“It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” - Ben Rector
Well it is the most-wonderful-time of the year! So, I always loved this song. What I love most about the new A Ben Rector Christmas album is the entertainment aspect of it - not just how great the music is, but the cheeky add-ins. It reminds me of the night that Corri and I snuck off to The National Theater, the year we lived in Washington, DC, to see Donnie and Marie’s Christmas concert. It was SO FUN! We took pictures with the cardboard cutouts of Donnie and Marie in the reception area. We wore Christmas hats, and skipped through the square outside the theater, holding hands on our way to the Metro for the ride home. Happiness. That’s exactly what that night was. Its exactly what every good person deserves, especially this year.
That unabashed happiness is present throughout Ben’s album, with the pinnacle of the entertainer that is Ben Rector is being showcased on “Its the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” In just a few spoken lines at the beginning of the song, you are transported to a live theater setting and realize this is all happening for you. To make you happy! Then the unexpected dichotomy of Ben’s spoken voice and his delivery of the first lines of this classic song. But those entertainer elements persist (if you listen closely, you’ll hear the localized Nashville weather report) until those precise vocal dynamics that close out this song!
LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC: “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”
