Star Trek Playlist: The Enterprise

I like to build little playlists of soundtrack music for myself to listen to as I work. A lot of these are pretty obvious: I have a Star Wars one with all the opening and closing tracks from each film, plus significant character themes.

One of my favorite ones draws from the Star Trek movies, which is based around tracks from each film that focus on the Enterprise. Here's the complete set:

1. Jerry Goldsmith, "The Enterprise" (from Star: The Motion Picture: Limited Edition)
2. James Horner, "Enterprise Clears Moorings" (from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Newly Expanded Edition)
3. James Horner, "Stealing the Enterprise" (from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Newly Expanded Edition)
4. Jerry Goldsmith, "A Tall Ship" (from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: The Complete Score)
5. Cliff Eidelman, "Clear All Moorings" (from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: The Complete Score)
6. Dennis McCarthy, "The Enterprise B" (from Star Trek Generations: Expanded Collector's Edition)
7. Jerry Goldsmith, "How Many Ships" (from Star Trek: First Contact: Limited Edition)
8. Jerry Goldsmith, "Star Field / Positronic" (from Star Trek Nemesis: The Deluxe Edition)
9. Michael Giacchino, "Enterprising Young Men" (from Star Trek)
10. Michael Giacchino, "Undersea Enterprises, Inc." (from Star Trek Into Darkness: The Deluxe Edition)
11. Michael Giacchino, "Yorktown Theme" (from Star Trek Beyond: The Deluxe Edition)

The Enterprise theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture of course needs no introduction or justification. Say what you like about the six-minute flyby of the ship, but the Enterprise has never looked better on screen, nor has it ever been treated better by a filmmaker. Part of that is, of course, Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful score for the sequence, which captures the majesty and the beauty of the starship in a way no one else ever has, before or since. My iTunes tells me it's not my most-played track on the list, but that's only because I originally had the non-limited edition of the TMP soundtrack; if you added my plays of the same track from that version, it would take the top spot.

Goldsmith reprises the Enterprise theme in the other tracks from him I have on the list: "A Tall Ship" from ST V, "How Many Ships" from First Contact, and "Star Field" from Nemesis. "A Tall Ship" is good stuff; I think on the whole, the ST V soundtrack finds interesting things to do with Goldsmith's original themes from TMP in new ways, and this track is no exception. Unfortunately, the directors of the TNG films never gave the Enterprise-E the kind of extended beauty shots the directors of the original films did, so the tracks from FC and Nemesis just feature brief restatements of the Enterprise theme from TMP over short establishing shots. (I'm sure there's a reprise of the Enterprise theme somewhere in Insurrection, but I don't have it on my list.)

For both ST II and VI, my list uses the track in the movie where the Enterprise is launched from spacedock. Arguably, neither James Horner nor Cliff Eidelman composed an "Enterprise theme" the way that Goldsmith did (or Giacchino later would), but both of these are great bits of music that turn something procedural into something majestic. Horner's piece is exciting and thrilling, while Eidelman's is almost mournful—the last time we would see the "original" Enterprise on the big screen. (Yes, I know the Enterprise-A is not really the original Enterprise, but it looks like her and it has the original cast on board.) I use the version just called "Clear All Moorings" from the original ST VI album, not the one that adds the "Spacedock" theme from the complete score.

Other than Goldsmith's original theme, my favorite Enterprise-focused piece of music is certainly "Stealing the Enterprise" from ST III. This is the thrilling piece that plays during what is the very best sequence from the entire film, when the Enterprise crew steal the Enterprise in order to travel to the Genesis planet. I could watch that sequence a million times and never be bored. "And... now, Mr. Scott." "Sir?" "The doors, Mr. Scott." "Aye sir, I'm working on it." The surprised relief on the faces of William Shatner and James Doohan as the doors finally open is utterly convincing. Oh, and then "GOOD MORNING CAPTAIN." Listening to the music never fails to bring me back to this.

There are actually two versions of this track on the ST III expanded soundtrack; I have the one closer to the music used in the finished film on my Enterprise playlist, but there's also one with some nice Prokofiev-esque flourishes as well.

Dennis McCarthy's soundtrack to Generations is by far the weakest ever composed for a Star Trek film, but there is a very quick restatement of Goldsmith's Enteprise theme combined with McCarthy's own Generations theme when we first see the Enterprise-B.

Lastly, there are the three tracks composed by Michael Giacchino. Though his style of scoring isn't totally to my taste, one can't deny that his score was the first to treat the Enterprise with the reverence she deserved since the original films—though this is because J. J. Abrams gave him the space to do it. The scene where Kirk first sees the Enterprise in space has this amazing theme under it. (I prefer the 2:40 version from the original soundtrack to the longer version from the deluxe edition, since what's added onto the longer version is not Enterprise-focused.) The scene from Into Darkness that most prominently reprises this is the reveal that the Enterprise is hidden underwater on the planet Nibiru. Can you hide a starship underwater? Who cares, so long as it looks and sounds this cool.

The track I selected from Beyond isn't Enterprise-focused per se, but it's in the spirit of the tracks I selected from ST II, III, and VI, except in reverse: instead of the Enterprise launching from spacedock, it's from a scene where the Enterprise returns to spacedock, a beautiful scene of the stasrship making its way into and through the amazing Starbase Yorktown. Yorktown is the focus here, not the Enterprise, but still it's a worthy track anyway. As one of the commenters on the YouTube video I've linked says, "Yorktown is the Federation itself represented in one city.  We the audience, and the characters on the Enterprise, get to see this beautiful 'snow globe' filled with people from all walks of life and all races living and working together harmoniously.  All the while they're surrounded and supported by technological marvels so advanced that they're damned close to magic.... This sequence tells the audience, and Kirk's crew, 'This is worth fighting for.'"

Put all this together, and you have a beautiful 34-minute journey through some of the best film music ever composed. Will the playlist ever get any longer? The prospects on this front seem pretty dim at the moment (it has been ten years, the longest of any such gaps), but I live in hope. 

Jump to the Beat!

As has been mentioned here on several occasions, I've been listening to my music more consistently in the last couple years. The consequence of this is, of course, that so have my kids. While Kid One is largely agnostic toward music (they do occasionally enjoy a bit of They Might Be Giants), Kid Two, like me, is the kind of person who will get a song stuck in their head and begin singing it randomly later on.

A particular favorite of Kid Two's in this regard is Belle and Sebastian's "The Party Line." I know Belle and Sebastian has been around for a while, and plays the kind of music that is very much to my taste, but I only got into them within the past six months, and have listened to their album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015) a decent amount. Kid Two would randomly bust out with "jump to the beat of the party line!" and begin jumping around. It actually hit the point where I could be listening to a different Belle and Sebastian track and he would start going, "Put on 'Party Line'!" (I do not think Kid One has this capacity to recognize different artists' styles yet.)

This wasn't the only song Kid Two would bust out with at random; in particular, the other was Goldfish's "Show You How," where he would just start going "get up and shake it now!" To a lesser extent, he'd sometimes also do the "oooh waaah oooh waaah oooooh oooh waaah oooh waaah oooh" bit from Goldfish's "This Is How It Goes."

Additionally, at his daycare, he somehow picked up "We Will Rock You," though he thought it was "We will, we will, we will rock and roll you," and would often ask for "rock and roll"... and would accept literally no other song as "rock and roll" because it didn't say "rock and roll" in it! I don't have any Queen on my iPod, but I did persuade him to accept "We Built This City" as a substitute... though the version I own is from 2011's The Muppets!

This seemed like enough songs for a critical mass, so I ended up making Kid Two a Yoto card. A Yoto, if you don't know, is a kid-friendly, screen-free audio player. Both of our kids own Yoto Minis, which allow them to place various cards in them that stream audio content: music, audiobooks, podcasts, and such. You can purchase premade cards from Yoto (we have bought a number of audiobooks from them especially), but you can also build your own playlists and link them to "make-your-own cards"; for Kid One, I have made a card of Pokémon theme songs, for example, and both kids have copies of a card of songs from Colourblocks and Numberblocks.

Kid Two was into the card. This was back in January, I think, and as time has passed, I have added songs to it either when I notice him singing them a lot or when he specifically requests I do so. He listened to it a lot early on, less so recently, but I'm sure he'll rediscover it sooner or later. Here's the current track listing:

1. "The Party Line" by Belle and Sebastian, from Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015)
2. "Show You How" by Goldfish, from Get Busy Living (2010)
3. "This Is How It Goes" by Goldfish, from Perceptions of Pacha (2008)
4. "We Built This City" by the Muppets, from The Muppets (2011)
5. "Shake It Up" by Nortec Collective, from Tijuana Sound Machine (2008)
6. "Mouthwash" by Kate Nash, from Made Of Bricks (2007)
7. "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
8. "Talk to Me" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
9. "If I Could Find" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
10. "What Might Have Been" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
11. "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants, from Flood (1990)
12. "Watching You" by Rogue Traders, from Here Come the Drums (2005)

Forty-eight minutes of excellent taste! Clearly a fan of South African house music in particular. His interest can often turn on very small things, in all seriousness; "Mouthwash" is on there because he likes the bit where Kate Nash goes "and I'm singing 'uh oh' on a Friday night..."

I do have to double-check lyrics before loading them onto the card (thankfully the Kate Nash song is appropriate for example! on the other hand, "The Party Line" includes the lyric, "People like to drive their cars and smoke up / People like to sit inside and toke up").

I recently asked him which of the songs on the card was his favorite, and he told me it was "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor. That one is a hit with both kids!

EDITED ON 2 MAY 2026: Just added "Get Down" from They Might Be Giants's new album The World Is to Dig at his request!

The Music of Amanita Design

Regular readers will know that I've been getting back into music of late, both stuff I am nostalgic for and new stuff by old favorites (and also new-to-me bands, but that's a post I haven't written yet). But I've also been getting back into soundtrack music: the floor where my office is is mostly empty these days, so I have been listening to music because it's depressing sitting up there for eight hours in silence. This has spurred me to get back into buying soundtracks, something I used to do with regularity but fell away from since it didn't make sense to buy soundtracks I would then not listen to.

One of the weird things about being a soundtrack collector is when you pick up soundtracks for things you don't actually watch. I have all the soundtracks for the new Battlestar Galactica series, even including spin-offs like Blood & Chrome and Caprica, even though I stopped watching the show during season three. That makes a sort of sense: I knew I liked Bear McCreary's work from the first two seasons, so it stands to reason I would enjoy more of it.

But sometimes I buy soundtracks to things I don't actually do. For example, my wife was into puzzle videogames in the early 2010s, and I ended up enjoying the music to games I never played but did overhear her playing. Most notably, there was Machinarium (2009), where you are (if I remember right) an old rusty robot on a quest. It has whimsical, moody music, the perfect kind of thing to read or write or grade papers along to. I think the game (which she probably got via Humble Bundle) may have actually even come with a soundtrack. The music was by Tomáš Dvořák, a Czech composer who also goes by the name Floex. 

I enjoyed it enough that later I ended up tracking down more Machinarium music by Dvořák: he also put out a free EP of bonus music (I particularly like "Game In The Brain"), but also I got some unreleased source music somewhere... though I don't know where that actually came from, given it was added to my iTunes a decade ago.

The publisher of Machinarium is Amanita Design; I don't remember exactly how I came across another soundtrack for one of their games, but my guess is it is because of the pandemic. Not that I was playing videogames, but I guess my wife must have been, because the soundtrack for Botanicula (2012) was added to my iTunes in April 2020. What else was there to do during that time? Botanicula's music, by Czech duo DVA, is a bit more cutesy than Machinarium's, but still quite enjoyable. (There's a fun Star Wars–inspired track which doesn't seem to be on the Bandcamp album.)

Once I had two albums for Amanita products, clearly this was a thing, so I began adding them to my soundtracks-to-get list. Last fall, once I got back into soundtrack music, I picked up the music to Samorost 2 (2006), which I believe was Dvořák's first work for Amanita. (My understanding is that the music to the original Samorost was unlicensed tracks downloaded off the Internet by the developers.) This one was pretty good, but what I have really been digging is his music to Samorost 3 (2016), which I picked up just after Christmas. I particularly like the main theme.

I am bad at writing about music (hence my whole reason for attempting this irregular series of posts about it), so I can't tell you what I like about it, but if you like electronic soundtrack music, I highly encourage you to support the work of Dvořák and DVA even if you are not a videogame player!

Five Very Good New Albums by Old Favorites

As previously mentioned on this blog, I've been getting back into music over the last year, having not done much listening to music since my first kid was born in 2018. Some of what I've been doing is picking up albums by new-to-me bands (The National, Belle and Sebastian, My Friend the Chocolate Cake). That I will probably make a different post about someday. But the other thing I have been doing is collecting albums that bands I listened to pre-kids have put out since I had kids. I am seven years behind, so there is quite a lot to catch up on!

Florence + the Machine, High as Hope (2018) 

This is the fourth album by Florence + the Machine, an alternative rock band (I think? I am so bad at genre) from the UK. I think their most famous album remains their 2009 debut Lungs; certainly "Drumming Song" is probably their most famous song. Lead singer Florence Welch has an amazing, powerful voice, and I would say the band's sound is often distinguished by big, powerful arrangements. My favorite song by them is actually the title track from their 2015 album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, which features both powerful lyrics from Florence but also a beautiful trumpet solo.

High as Hope is actually a bit different, with somewhat less emphasis on the powerful stuff. There are a couple stripped back songs about the necessity of faith and grace that really resonated with me: "Big God" and, in particular, "Grace."

Kate Nash, Yesterday Was Forever (2018)

I think it was my sister who got me into Kate Nash, another female vocalist from the UK. In particular, I love her song "Foundations" from Made Of Bricks (2007): "My fingertips are holding onto / The cracks in our foundation / And I know that I should let go / But I can't." Her songs alternate between this very earnest emotion and cheeky irreverence that appeals to me; she has weird and fun lyrics but also a lot of anger and energy.

Though I like her a lot, I did kind of worry she had a very specific, period-based vibe. Like was that angsty, late 2000s/early 2010s vibe still going to hold up in 2025? Well, I guess I don't know about 2025 (she has a 2024 album I haven't got to yet), but 2018 was a good year for her because I think Yesterday Was Forever has a number of strong tracks. In particular, I like "Karaoke Kiss":

To be honest, like many songs, I'm not sure I could totally tell you what it's about, but my vibe is that it's about new love, and how meeting someone can fill an emptiness in you even when it's not necessarily the right thing for you: "Kiss me in the karaoke bar / I need something, I feel so dark."

Lena, Only Love, L (2019)

Look, they can't all be quirky UK female songwriters; some of my favorites are quirky German songwriters. I discovered Lena Meyer-Landrut back when I was in grad school, thanks to the magic of Pandora. She's probably worth a full post someday, because I think she's had an interesting trajectory, from her early work which has this kind of "I'm so cute and quirky and wholesome vibe" that I associate with mid-2000s female singer-songwriters (though she was always more poppy)—see for example "Satellite" or "Caterpillar in the Rain" from her 2010 album My Cassette Player—that transitioned into more traditionally sexy stuff—I am a huge fan of "Taken by a Stranger" from 2011's Good News.

Of all the albums on this list of five, this is probably the one it took me the longest to warm up to, and I do think some of it is pretty generic pop, not as fun or interesting as the work Lena was doing earlier in her career. I was thus a bit surprised to find myself coming around to and then actively enjoying the track "skinny bitch," which is about a far from wholesome as you can get!

However, there is something kind of freeing about the chorus, which I enjoy belting along with: "When life gives you lemons, mix it up with vodka soda. / Love your imperfections, fuck the haters, they don't know ya!"

But just not when my kids are around! 

Ingrid Michaelson, Stranger Songs (2019)

See, some of my quirky female vocalists are even American! Ingrid Michaelson has had what feels like a kind of typical trajectory for an artist I am interested in, which is from very quirky, stripped back stuff to more overtly poppy material. I feel like there's a world of difference between her strumming the ukelele on "You and I" from Girls and Boys (2006) to pop anthems like "Girls Chase Boys" from Lights Out (2014), even if I like both. I do have to say I don't really get why the conceit behind this album is that they are all inspired by Stranger Things, but it did result in some good songs nonetheless. My favorite from the album is "Jealous":

(What I did not know until just now is that "Jealous" has a music video with art by Amanda Conner, one of my all-time favorite comic book illustrators. What a weird and unexpected collision of two totally different worlds.)

Regina Spektor, Home, before and after (2022)

I swear do I listen to songs with male vocalists, but indeed, you will find none of them in this post. Once again we have a quirky 2000s singer-songwriter... perhaps the most archetypal quirky 2000s singer-songwriter of them all! If you didn't listen to Begin To Hope (2006) in college, are you really a millennial? So much good stuff throughout her career; I would be hard-pressed to pick an album as a favorite. I do have to say that 2016's Remember Us to Life is my least favorite; it has some good tracks but it's certainly the one I relisten to as a whole the least. Thus, I was a little trepidatious about her newest album after a six-year gap, Home, before and after, but it won me over basically right away, and I have been listening to it quite a bit since I picked it up earlier this month.

Lots of great stuff here, but I have particularly enjoyed the desperation of "One Man's Prayer" ("I just want some girl to talk to me / And tell me that I'm different or say that I'm the same. / I don't care what she thinks, just think of me.") and the extravagance of "Spacetime Fairytale" and the weirdness of "SugarMan."

But the one that knocked me over was "Up the Mountain," a kind of creepy song with very tantalizing lyrics:

In the ocean there’s a mountain.
On the mountain there’s a forest.
In the forest there’s a garden.
In the garden there’s a flower.
In the flower there’s a nectar.
In the nectar there’s an answer.
In that answer there’s another
And another and another
And another and another.

Not only did I love it, but it came on my iPod when I was driving my seven-year-old somewhere, and once it was done, they demanded I go back to the beginning so they could hear it all! If you know my seven-year-old, you'll know that it rarely gets better than that.

Five Very Good Albums from When I Was in College

A couple months ago, a colleague mentioned "millennial walks" to me. This is apparently a TikTok thing, where millennials go on walks listening to "our" music, thinking of a better time when democracy wasn't collapsing and it felt like maybe someday you could afford to retire.

I can't claim that I've adopted this habit per se, but the last six months have seen me listening to a lot more music than I have in a long time. After Kid One was born, my at-home music got a lot more curtailed because it felt like we were always trying to get someone to nap; later, Kid One would often complain whenever I played music. But things are better on those fronts these days and I find myself hooking up my iPod to its speakers (that's how you know I'm a millennial!) and playing music at home, or bringing my iPod along in the car.

This does mean that I haven't really developed any new musical tastes since my older kid was born in 2018... but let's be fair, I was in my mid-thirties by then, I wasn't developing new musical tastes anyway. Mostly I've been relistening to stuff I got into during grad school, and catching up on new albums by artists I was into back then.

For this post, I want to talk about five albums from my college years, my own "millennial walk" playlist of sorts... which is funny because I actually didn't listen to music until after I graduated from college. But this is the music from that era I've been reconnecting to.

The Decemberists, Picaresque (2005)

My grad school friend Andrew Grubb got me into the Decemberists, who were (I think) the first band I ever saw in concert; the first album I ever picked up by them was Picaresque, which for me remains their best in its sheer concentration of high-quality works: I think "16 Military Wives" was the one he gave me that hooked me, but I also love "The Infanta," "The Bagman's Gambit," "The Mariner's Revenge Song," and "Of Angels and Angles." It's also one of those albums that's perfectly sequenced, each track leading into the next in such a way that it's greater than the sum of its parts.

My favorite song, though, is "The Sporting Life" about a kid who's an eternal disappointment to everyone around him—at least in his own mind—rendered in an ironic upbeat style. If you want to understand what it is to be Steve Mollmann, you could do worse than to listen to this song on repeat: "There's my father looking on, / And there's my girlfriend arm in arm / With the captain of the other team, / And all of this is clear to me, / They condescend to fix on me and frown."

The Weepies, Say I Am You (2005)

I think it was my mom who introduced me to the acoustic rock strains of the Weepies, a husband-and-wife duo. One of the interesting things of getting back into music I enjoyed when I was in my mid-twenties is finding out that, somehow, all my favorite cute young quirky singer-songwriters are middle-aged and have children. How did they get old!? Perhaps most depressing of all was to realize there never will be any more Weepies albums because they got divorced. They tell you there's a point in your life where everyone gets married, they tell you there's a point in your life where everyone has kids, but no one tells you there's going to be a point in your life where everyone gets divorced!

But we can pretend these kind of things don't happen if we listen to a twenty-year-old Weepies album. It has a lot of good tracks, but "Slow Pony Home" is one of my favorites:

I need to seek out some of Deb Talan's solo work, but I haven't got there yet.

Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)

I want to say I discovered Regina Spektor thanks to Pandora back when I was in grad school, but who knows. All her albums are great, and I particularly enjoy Soviet Kitsch (2003) and Far (2009), but if we're looking for one that came out when I was squarely in college, that would be Begin To Hope. Like most of her albums, it has a lot of quirky, up-tempo energetic music despite its often dark topics. Just today, I listened to "That Time," which segues from her discussion of different kinds of cigarettes she likes:

Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey, remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care; I just bummed from my friends.

...into a discussion of when her friend overdosed:

Hey, remember that time when you OD'ed?
Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?
Well, in the waiting room while waiting for news of you,
I hallucinated I could read your mind,
And I was on a lot of shit too, but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky.

Remember that time the world was simpler? Not sure I could explain why this song does but it does.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (2006)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a punk band, another my friend Andrew got me into during grad school. My favorite album by them is 2009's It's Blitz!, but their album that actually came out when I was in college was Show Your Bones. My favorite track from this one is probably "Cheated Hearts":

Cheated by the opposite of love,
Held on high from up up up above,
Kept my high from the second one,
Kept my eye on the first one.

Now take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.
Take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.

Is the lyrics website I just looked at right? I always thought it was "stow them safely." Anyway, I very rarely feel like I know what any Yeah Yeah Yeahs song is actually about but I always enjoy the vibe.

Goldfish, Caught in the Loop (2006)

I got into Goldfish a bit later than all the other entries on this list. They're a South African electronica group; when my wife spent her summers doing field work in South Africa, the South Africans in her group like to blare them while working, and I ended up hooked too. There's a lot of good music here to blast, but my favorite from this album is "The Four Forty Five Blues."

Chill but you can also jam out to it I guess? Good music to grade by or do the dishes to; as a middle-aged millennial, these are my most common activities while listening to music.

Five Very Good Christmas Albums You Should Listen To

I love Christmas music.

I'm not one of those mad people who starts listening to it in early October, but as soon as we're home from our Thanksgiving trip, I synchronize the iPod and load up my collection of Christmas music—416 tracks and counting. And it is my firm belief that if Christmas lasts twelve days, you ought to be able to keep listening to Christmas music until January 6th... though my wife strongly disagrees with that.

I don't know that I could articulate exactly what I like about it... joyousness, hope, redemption, certainly, but also cold, and a sense that we're keeping that cold at bay.

Every year I try to pick up one or two Christmas albums that I don't already own and add them to my rotation. Here are five Christmas albums that I've been enjoying recently:

Bing Crosby, Christmas Classics (2006)

I am a big fan of Bing Crosby's Christmas music; I own 45 different tracks by him. Mostly in two albums, this one and The Best of Bing Crosby: The Christmas Collection, but also some tracks by him on an album my family owned growing up, It's Christmas Time, which had a mix of stuff by him, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, and is what introduced me to him. His version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" is definitive.

A few years ago I suddenly wondered if he had ever done "The Little Drummer Boy" because it seemed like one he would have done really well. Some poking around led me to this album, which collects sixteen of his Christmas songs, only three of which overlapped with ones I already owned. Not just "The Little Drummer Boy," but some others of my favorite Christmas songs like "O Holy Night" and "What Child Is This?" The most fascinating song on the album, though, is a second version of "The Little Drummer Boy," done intercut with an original song "Peace on Earth" sung by David Bowie. This was created for a Bing Crosby tv Christmas special.

Over the Rhine, Blood Oranges in the Snow (2014)

The first two Christmas albums of Cincinnati band Over the Rhine, The Darkest Night of the Year. (1996) and Snow Angel (2006), have been favorites of mine since introduced to me by my father. The first is a mixture of staples and original compositions, the latter is all original (I think). Like a lot of stuff on this list, they have a slightly melancholy tone that really captures the Christmas spirit for me. This year, it occurred to me that it's been seventeen years since Snow Angel, had they put out a third Christmas album? Yes... almost a decade ago!

All the tracks on this one are good of course, but one day my five-year-old was there when "Let It Fall" was playing and he started going, "No, don't let it fall!", which made me really pay attention to the lyrics to that one for the first time: "Whatever we’ve lost, / I think we’re gonna let it go. / Let it fall, / Like snow. / 'Cause rain and leaves / And snow and tears and stars, / And that’s not all my friend, / They all fall with confidence and grace. / So let it fall, let it fall." It's a good reminder that there are things we needs to let go of and let fall, we can't keep it all wound up inside ourselves.

Chris Standring & Kathrin Shorr, Send Me Some Snow (2011)

I first heard a song from this album at Panera Bread, actually, frantically getting some grading done the Saturday after finals week in 2019. I was instantly drawn to its "cool vintage style" and Shazamed it to discover it was the work of Chris Standring (who plays the guitar) and Kathrin Shorr (who does the singing). I think they're married? I believe he's an bestselling performer of... jazz or something.

Anyway, this is an album of entirely original Christmas compositions that instantly feel timeless. They feel like something you could imagine coming out of the Big Crosby era of music... only he never sang any of these songs because they didn't exist yet. Shorr is a breathy, beautiful vocalist and really the person who makes the album soar. I like "Naughty or Nice" a lot, and the title track is excellent, but the one I've elected to share here is "Someone's Gotta Get Something for Christmas." Could that someone be me?

Sting, If on a Winter's Night... (2009)

When we regularly went home to Cincinnati every Christmas, my friend David would have us over for dinner. One year, this was playing and he revealed to me that it was by Sting of all people. (Admittedly, when it comes to Sting, I mostly think of him as the depraved Harkonnen nephew from Dune, but I'm reasonably certain most people don't think of him as the kind of guy who puts out Christmas albums.) There are few Christmas standards here; rather, it's an album of traditional English folk songs with lutes, guitars, trumpets, and so on. More than any other item on this list, it captures that idea I mentioned in my opening: it's a cold album, but what it celebrates is how we push back against it. 

There are a lot of good tracks, but my favorite is "Soul Cake," about people going "souling" (door to door begging for a cookie-like food called a soul cake): "If you haven't got a penny, / A ha'penny will do; / If you haven't got a ha'penny, / It's God bless you." Sting's version mixes in some of the melody of my favorite Christmas carol, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," too. (Wikipedia tells me this owes a debt to a version by Peter, Paul, and Mary.)

Seth MacFarlane & Liz Gillies, We Wish You the Merriest (2023)

My choices can't all be original hipster nonsense, can they? When I was in grad school, a colleague—even more into Christmas music than me—was blaring some Bing Crosby-, Frank Sinatra-esque Christmas music in the program office. Who was singing, I asked, and I was astonished to learn that it was Seth "Family Guy" MacFarlane. I went home and picked up his album Holiday for Swing! (2014). He's no Bing Crosby, of course, but it's a pretty strong pastiche.

This year, he has a new one out, a set of duets with the former Disney Channel star Liz Gillies. The title track is strong, but my favorite is probably "Christmas Time All Over the World," where the two sing Christmas greetings from a variety of different languages. (Apparently this is originally a Sammy Davis, Jr. song, but as far as I know, this is the first I've heard it.)

Hopefully you've found something new here! This was fun to write up; maybe I'll do it again next year but with (somewhat) less pretentious picks.

Mele Kalikimaka!

Paddy Kingsland, Electronic Music Pioneer

As I am wont to do, I've been thinking about Paddy Kingsland recently. Kingsland is probably my favorite composer of the classic era of Doctor Who, a member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop that gave us the scores to serials such as Full Circle, Mawdryn Undead, and (best of all) Logopolis. He also did the music for the radio and television versions of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love it all, from the melancholic death theme for the fourth Doctor, to this groovy bit:

Interestingly enough, Kingsland recorded a few albums of stock music back in the 1980s that are still used to this day, on shows such as Spongebob Squarepants! I wonder how much money he makes off that-- if any. As far as I can tell, no one's ever asked him about Spongebob in an interview. At least, not in any interview that I can locate on-line.

Kingsland in 1974. He was employed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1970 to 1981, though he still contributed to Doctor Who afterwards.
courtesy The White Files

Kingsland did much of his work on the Moog and other synthesizers; he released an album called Moogerama even. I am really fascinated by this era of electronic music. Though in the 1960s, the Radiophonic Workshop did groundbreaking things with tape splicing, by the 1980s, synthesizers had come in, and they were writing music that took advantage of its abilities. The doom-laden score of Logopolis is hard to imagine any other way-- as is K-9's jaunty theme from Full Circle.

When searching to see if Kingsland ever talked about his Spongebob work, I found a number of interviews, and I want to combine some of them here to create a sort of mini-oral history.

When you’re doing music to order, if somebody says ‘I’ve got this pay, it’s very, very sinister, uneasy atmosphere, something awful is just about to happen’; you can almost hear the music before you start. If somebody says ‘I’ve got this wonderful project, we’re asking five musicians to make any kind of music they like, you can do anything you want, you can hire an orchestra you can do it on a banjo, you can do it on synthesisers, electronics, lampshades, anything you like and we’re going to pay you for it’; what usually happens is you just kind of go into a daze and you find yourself unable to produce anything. Whereas if somebody says ‘I need this and I need it by Thursday, that’s something that allows you to work and it makes you work. [source]

The synthesisers were a great labour saving device but when they first came in, they were kind of research tools, in a way. You had to plug everything up and make the sounds yourself. But, later, presets made sounds for you and all you had to do was push the button and you got the sound. That was unfortunate because everybody started sounding the same. I don’t mean at the Workshop necessarily, I mean generally speaking. People were buying synthesisers at home and using them at schools. [source]

"Moogerama" was a library album produced by Syd Dale for his company Amphonic Music, which is still around today. Again we recorded session players at Lansdowne studios and I wrote out parts for them including the synth parts. It was more of a conventional library album featuring synth than an electronic music project. [source]

The KPM albums [the library albums, such as the ones used on Spongebob] are still in use, I am happy to say and most of them feature conventional musicians recorded either in my studio or elsewhere. [source]

If you search his name on YouTube, there's a ton of stuff from his various albums-- many of which have only ever been released on vinyl. It's really diverse stuff, most of it not really like the morose mood stuff I'm used to from Doctor Who, more like his K-9 or chase themes. You have this jaunty little adventure tune:

And this even more upbeat one:

On the other hand, you have this piece which sounds like the opening to a 1980s sitcom:

Though I really like this piece, which is very wistful:

Some of his work is actually on iTunes and Amazon Digital Music; I need to check it out.

2Concert Reviews: Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage and 2Cellos

Over the past couple weeks, I've had the pleasure of going to two different concerts. I always imagine my adult life would be filled with cultural events for my edification and entertainment; the realities of graduate school and living in the middle of nowhere have meant this hasn't happened as often as I'd've liked. However, I've recently been to two different concerts.

I've previously written about the dominance of soundtrack music in my listening, and Star Trek soundtracks are probably the most dominant of all-- certainly they're the ones I've been listening to the longest (right now the track "Target Practice" from the deluxe edition of the Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is playing in my iTunes, in fact) and when I was a kid, we often went to excellent concerts of Star Trek music put on by the Cincinnati Pops, conducted by the late Erick Kunzel. It's been a long time since I've seen one, though, and I was adamant that my wife and I go see Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage, a 50th-anniversary concert tour.

It was good. It was a "CineConcert," which apparently means that there's narration between musical bits, and the music is all played over video montages. Both the music and the clips really favored the original series films and The Next Generation episodes. The best of these was probably setting the lovely Jay Chattaway "The Inner Light" suite to clips about family, both literal (Picard and his brother, Wesley and his father) and emotional (Kirk with Spock and McCoy, Picard sitting down to play poker in "All Good Things..."). Jerry Goldsmith's "Klingon Battle" was of course set to clips of Klingons in battle, and this was excellent, too. Some concert performance of "Klingon Battle" are limp due to the lack of the unusual percussion and electronic instrumentation Goldsmith used, but they made it work. My favorite montage was probably the one set to the full version of Alexander Courage's original theme (I think of it as the concert suite, but I don't know if that's true or not), a fun and uplifting set of behind-the-scenes and before-the-camera clips from all fifty years of Star Trek. It was an excellent way to end the concert.

The only thing I didn't like was the occasional mismatch between music and image. Though I think they got away with using Jerry Goldsmith's theme for the anti-technological Ba'ku with a montage of Spock and Data moments, it was jarring to have Goldsmith's original Enterprise theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture used with a montage about humanity's journey of exploration, from sailing ships to the Phoenix to the NX-01. Weirdest of all was using the main themes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager for franchise-spanning montages: Dennis McCarthy's Deep Space Nine theme was used, for example, for a montage about the various captains, which just seemed weird.

I did really enjoy when they took scenes from the television programs and played them in full, except that the music was provided live. They did two scenes from each series, I think: of course the iconic Gerald Fried fight music from "Amok Time" for the original, as well as the "Risk is Our Business" speech from "Return to Tomorrow" (music by George Duning). The use of the final scene of "In the Pale Moonlight" (music by David Bell) for Deep Space Nine was great, but I did question the use of one of Jay Chattaway's incredibly generic action motifs (from "The Changing Face of Evil") for the second Deep Space Nine episode. I would much rather have had one of the beautiful scenes from McCarthy's score for "The Visitor"! And the music from Enterprise reinforced just how forgettable that series was, in the musical sense as well as every other; it was painful watching Scott Bakula and Anthony Montgomery in a scene from "Horizon" (music by Mark McKenzie).

But overall, it was a great time that left me humming Courage's original theme. I need to build a playlist of what we heard; it would be fun!

Just the other day we went to see a performance by 2Cellos, who mostly do cello covers of pop and rock; my wife is a pretty big cello aficionado, and their debut album gets pretty frequent play on my iPod. My dismal musical knowledge means I actually don't know most of the songs they're riffing on, but I enjoy their energetic playing nonetheless.

At one point, one of the two guys advised us that this was "not a classical music concert," and that was very much true: there were lots of flashing lights and lots of noise, and it was a lot of fun. The two of them are nowhere near as serious as their promotional photographs indicate; there was a lot of stage patter about how their music was beautiful and they were beautiful.

The only thing I have to complain about is that the video monitors often overlaid images of them with other graphics, which made it hard to actually see them-- and as we were literally in the very last row, I very much needed the power of those video monitors. And I don't know why one of the music video featured a clip of an old man playing what was apparently atomic chess again and again, but it was so absurd it became sublime.

I apparently don't have as much to say about 2Cellos as I do Star Trek (no surprise there), but I really enjoyed this concert, and even though I probably knew over 50% of what they played from their debut album, the live renditions of the songs were different and very dynamic, and occasionally the audience sang along which was nice.

Star Wars: Ewok Celebration!

I listen to a lot of soundtrack music; indeed, it constitutes the majority of the music on my iPod. I don't like reading or writing to music with lyrics, so it gets a lot of play as I work. You might not be surprised to learn that much of the music comes from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who; I'm an assiduous collector of soundtracks for all three franchises.

Thus it's been a perennial source of aggravation to listen to my 2004 "Collector's Edition" of the soundtrack for Star Wars, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and have to hear "Victory Celebration." As you know, one of the alterations of George Lucas's 1997 "Special Editions" was to augment the ending of Return of the Jedi cutting away from the celebrations on Endor to show celebrations on Coruscant, Bespin, and Tatooine. (In 2004, Naboo would be added, as well.) To match the new sequences, John Williams recorded a new musical cue, "Victory Celebration," replacing the original "Ewok Celebration," which you might know better as the "Yub Nub" song.

I love the "Yub Nub" song.

Seriously, it's just fun. Even if it wasn't, "Victory Celebration" is a pretty uninspired piece of music on its own merits.

What really grates is that the editions of the original trilogy soundtracks are the two-disc Collector's Editions, supposedly complete! Yet "Ewok Celebration" is nowhere to be heard, not even as an alternate track thrown on the end. Every time I listen to the Return of the Jedi soundtrack, or "Victory Celebration" comes up in shuffle, I just get mad that George Lucas's historical revisionism has to extend to the soundtracks of the films, pretending that music composed by John Williams doesn't even exist. I've considered buying the original 1983 CD release of the Episode VI used off Amazon soundtrack just so I could rip off that precious, precious final track. (Oh, and get ahold of "Lapti Nek," the song performed in Jabba's Palace that in the Special Edition was replaced with the awful, awful "Jedi Rocks.") Don't get me wrong, the Collector's Editions are otherwise fabulous, containing every minute of music from the original trilogy, but this omission has grated at me for years.

Until now.

Last week, Star Wars: The Ultimate Soundtrack Collection was released in three formats: CD, vinyl, and digital, containing the soundtracks to the first six Star Wars films. The CD versions of the original trilogy were sourced from the Collector's Editions, but the vinyl versions were the original 1970s/80s vinyl releases-- and, for some reason, the digital versions were sourced from the vinyl. From before Lucas's revisionism took hold. I have no idea why, but score!

You can now download "Ewok Celebration and Finale" for 99 cents! You can bet that I did it the same morning it was released, added it my iTunes Star Wars playlist in the place of "Victory Celebration," and listened to it straight away. Of course, it sounds amazing in its proper position. (And I'm happy to have "Lapti Nek" too.) Unsurprisingly, the little popularity bars on Amazon indicate "Ewok Celebration" is by far the album's most downloaded track.

Now that's a victory worth celebrating.