127. A Festive Hit for 2020
The Allusionist
Helen Zaltzman
4.7 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The usual canon of Christmas songs may not really fit people's moods in this year 2020, when I'm not sure a lot of us are feeling all that holly jolly. So I drafted in singer and songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs and we wrote a festive song that is suitable for 2020.
Content note: there are swears. Several of them.
Jenny Owen Youngs makes music - find it at jennyowenyoungs.com - and podcasts - Buffering the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars Investigations. She’s @jennyowenyoungs on Twitter and Instagram.
Martin Austwick provided music, backing vocals and linguistic analysis. Hear Martin’s own songs at palebirdmusic.com or on Spotify, and he’s @martinaustwick on Twitter and Instagram. He also composed the music for the kids’ science podcast Maddie’s Sound Explorers.
There’s more about this episode at theallusionist.org/mistletoe.
The Allusionist's online home is theallusionist.org. Support the show by becoming a patron at patreon.com/allusionist. Stay in touch at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow and instagram.com/allusionistshow.
Also, check out the previous festive Allusionist episodes, absolute bangers, one and all! We’ve got Winterval, a jolly romp through a portmanteau that sparked another war on the war on Christmas; How The Dickens Stole Christmas, about how Charles Dickens became a festive trend-setter; Dear Santa, about how a load of letters to Santa got delivered to a couple in Manhattan, who set out to answer them; and Xmas Man, about the many names for Santa/Father Christmas/St Nick, and deathy and meaty Victorian Christmas cards.
Support the show: http://patreon.com/allusionist
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the illusionist in which I Helen Salzman decked the halls with boughs of language. |
| 0:09.0 | Follalalalala language. |
| 0:12.0 | In today's episode we're getting festive. |
| 0:14.0 | Well festive for 2020. |
| 0:16.0 | Content note swears. |
| 0:19.0 | On with the show. |
| 0:21.0 | This time last year. |
| 0:28.0 | December 2019. |
| 0:30.0 | I was finishing up touring the illusionist's live show No Title around Canada and the USA. |
| 0:35.0 | The last stretch was a 2000 mile drive via some of the western USA's most charming, small |
| 0:40.3 | performance venues and geological spectacles. |
| 0:43.3 | And that allowed for a lot of time listening to car radio. |
| 0:46.0 | And these stations were blasting out the Christmas hits. |
| 0:49.0 | It's a pretty different selection in the US to the UK. |
| 0:52.0 | And after enough of looping, gently meaningless mid-20th century, Holly Jolly Jingle Jolly |
| 0:57.2 | Chestnuts. |
| 0:58.2 | I started to wonder if they were deliberately trying to hypnotise me into Christmas obedience. |
| 1:04.0 | Luckily my illusion brain was able to override that programming and started thinking about which |
| 1:09.8 | are the most frequently used words in festive hits. |
| 1:13.0 | So I set the illusionist elves onto the task of analysing a corpus of the most played Christmas |
| 1:18.6 | hits in the US and UK. |
| 1:20.6 | Filtering out common words such as and of two. |
... |
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