Christmas, Bring Us

The eleventh track on His ND Xmas is "Christmas, Bring Us" by The Grip Weeds. The song is streamable at their myspace page.

I've always considered the Grip Weeds to be a few steps beyond the other powerpop Beatles wannabes that sprouted in the early 90s, because they're so unapologetically Beatlesque (right down to their name) to render any complaints about their lack of originality meaningless, and they break the power-pop mold by having a chick in the band who doesn't even play bass! Like many of their contemporaries, their songs sound a bit samey over the course of an entire album, but their recent greatest "hits" compilation is pretty good from start to stop.

"Christmas, Bring Us" has been out for a couple of years, and almost made last year's Christmas mix, so it was near the top of songs I selected for this year's mix. It's a song about the hopefulness of the season in the face of all the materialism, and has lots of quotes from "It's a Wonderful Life" to boot.

Songwriter Kurt Reil said that he wanted the song to "to be good enough to measure up to our other songs and also be something you’d want to hear it even if it isn’t Christmastime." I think Kurt succeeded in the first part, and maybe even the second.

Non Xmas addendum: Mentioning those Beatles reminds me that Scott Miller's latest Beatles-heavy 1965 installment of "Music: What Happened?" has four songs that were in the top ten in the week I was born. Which was a pretty strong week for the Top Ten!