Spring is nearly here! Whether you’re desperate for sunshine or already wistfully missing those snowflakes, the two songs we cover this week – “White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes and “Strawberry Snow” by Brenda Lee – will hopefully have some comfort to offer you through this seasonal change.
We’re celebrating St. Joseph’s Day with two Italian Christmas songs! Well, Christmas songs in Italian, at least. Weeell… Christmas songs in Italian, or about Italy, or at least, sort of Italy-adjacent. We did our best. “Bianco Natale” by legendary Italian musician Mina transports us to the Italy of the 1960s, while “Buon Natale” by Nat King Cole transports us to, I dunno, some kind of weird fantasy Italy where phones never got invented?
This week, one of the calendar’s most somber holidays befalls us again. No, not Ash Wednesday – we’re talking about the return of Daylight Savings Time and the loss of that precious, precious hour. If you’re like us and you need every second you can get, maybe you’ll appreciate the short songs we chose for this week – “Holly Jolly Christmas” as performed by Michael Bublé is consistently Bublé, while “Good to Be Bad” by Pentatonix delivers an unexpected twist that has us contemplating a life of crime. Or at least, movies about a life of crime featuring Pentatonix.
This week, we celebrate Mardi Gras en français with a pair of songs hailing from the province of Quebec. “Fa la la” by Bündock is strange but charming, while “Le temps d’une dinde” by Roland Hi! Ha! Tremblay is … stranger and less charming? If you’re from Quebec and/or a French speaker who would like to explain the context we’re surely missing in this episode, please email us.
Valentine’s Day is upon us once again, and this year we’re tackling some holiday songs about love and romance that also turned out to be kind of spooky? By request, we listen to “Dear Santa (Bring me a Man this Christmas)” by The Weather Girls, which is weird but mostly charming. We pair it with “Christmas Eve” by Justin Bieber, which somehow manages to be even weirder, and also charmless.
A polarizing holiday classic is finally making its way onto our list! By request(s), we take a long, hard look at “Last Christmas” by Wham! and wash it down with George Michael’s “December Song (I Dreamed of Christmas)”.
For Groundhog Day, we’re celebrating the 90s way, with a little déjà vu! We cover requests from some of our repeat-requesters, digging into “Home Once a Year” by Marshall Burns and “Christmas C’mon” by Lindsey Stirling and Becky G.
Thanks to Listener Jenny and Captain McGloo for these requests!
This week we listen to two more Christmas songs from the southern hemisphere – “Aussie Jingle Bells” by Bucko & Champs, which is exactly what you would expect, and “Santa Never Made It Into Darwin” by Bill & Boyd, which is maybe more of a bummer than you would expect. FYI, this one is Ian’s fault.
It’s our first requests of 2019 (submitted in 2018)! We cover two songs destined for the “mushy middle” of the list, but each one brings us some joy along the way. “Santa Says Relax” by Joe Innes and the Cavalcade is a post-ironic indie tune that makes us wish it was Christmas, while “Christmas in New Orleans” by Rickie Lee Jones is a sad, complex song that merits a second listen.
RJ and Ian are back from their international holiday travels, and they are SLEEPY. In this first episode of HARK recorded on this side of 2019, Ian explains the Julian calendar, RJ coins some new idioms, and we cover two new year songs – “Same Old Land Syne” by Dan Fogelberg and “New Year’s Day” by U2. Yeah.
