Artists of all stripes put out new Christmas albums each year, but the country singers are particularly fond of the holiday. This year alone, Brad Paisley, Trisha Yearwood, Mickey Guyton, Hunter Hayes, and LeAnn Rimes released new holiday records.
Rimes is so enamored of Christmas music, in fact, that her newest album is titled Greatest Hits Christmas and features songs from the handful of other Christmas projects she’s released over the years (in addition to some new material).
One by-product of Billboard including streaming in its chart calculations, in addition to sales and radio play, is the proliferation of Christmas songs in the top ten each December.
Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want is Christmas is You‘ is perhaps the most notable example, as the song reclaims the #1 spot eery year, and this year became the song with the most weeks at #1 in history (20).
Like yesterday’s Throwback Weekend song, the #1 hit the week of December 21, 1985, was written for a movie. In this case, the film was White Nights, a Cold War drama starring Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov about a pair of dancers trapped in the Soviet Union.
I vaguely remember the film as a solid piece of mid-80s adult entertainment. I imagine the studio was chasing the success of another music-based drama, 1983’s Flashdance. The film had a decent pedigree, with Taylor Hackford directing and Helen Mirren and Isabella Rossellini in supporting roles.
Throwing back to the week of December 20, 1975, we find KC and the Sunshine Band atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘That’s the Way (I Like It),’ enjoying a return to #1 a month after it first made it.
At #2, a week before it claimed the top spot, was ‘Let’s Do It Again’ by The Staple Singers. This was the second #1 hit for the R&B quintet, following 1972’s ‘I’ll Take You There.’
I’ll be dedicating next week’s blog posts to Christmas music new and old, so I’m getting a head start today by featuring a track from Brad Paisley’s recently released Christmas album, Snow Globe Town.
This is Paisley’s first studio release in eight years, a long dry spell for a guy who put out an album every other year between 1999 and 2017. I’d welcome a new set of originals from Paisley, but I guess this is better than nothing.
Meet Me In Montauk 