Looking Back at the First 100, Pt. 1

Twelve Songs of Christmas

The previous episode with singer Meryl Zimmerman was number 100, and now that I've made it that far, I think it's time to stop and help some of you catch up. I've had a lot of episodes I'm really happy with that have moments I'm glad I helped to get into the world. Some realizations probably came together for the first time when we talked.

The conversations shed light on creativity, musicality, business, and spirituality--aspects the pop music enterprise that are too often overlooked or treated with too much care. I'm interested in all of these things, and Christmas music is a great vehicle to get into those topics.

You can hear all that in these excerpts from season one with guests Panorama Jazz Band, Robert Earl Keen, The Waitresses' Chris Butler and Mars Williams, PJ Morton, Pink Martini, and Lowland Hum. Originally, I thought I'd simply do one retrospective episode, but I realized pretty quickly that it would be three to four hours' long, or it would leave out too much to be satisfying for me. So I'll be back with more next week and likely the week after that.

Listening back is a little humbling, hearing some ratty production and a laid back intro affectation so extreme that I don't need to share any of that with you. You can't help but notice it though if you go back and check out the early episodes.

If you haven't already done so, please do what you have to do to get Twelve Songs in your podcast feed. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Pandora, and Spotify. During our post-Christmas break, we went live on the IHeartRadio platform, TuneIn, Audible, and Amazon's podcast platform. Now, you can ask Alexa and Siri to play the Twelve Songs of Christmas podcast and let them pop it up on your voice-controlled personal assistant.