Resounding: The Only Christmas/Holiday Playlists You'll Ever Need.

OK, sure, I'm biased. But I'm also insanely dedicated to curating these lists since 2015. Two choices. Endless hours. Just press play. But first, the origin story.

In December of 2015 — a full seven years ago — I decided to put Spotify to some good use by creating the one thing that, in that moment, seemed near and dear to me and yet utterly lacking everywhere I looked: A really great Christmas playlist.

So I made a playlist called “Merry Christmas, Baby,” after the great Charles Brown song (don’t Johnny Moore me — not having it). For someone who doesn’t like the blues (yeah, yeah, whatever) I am forever taken by Brown’s “uptown blues” and, before then, with the story of his life (I got to meet and interview him once). Anyway, it seemed kind of perfect that “Merry Christmas, Baby” — covered by tons of people but never ever done as well as Brown does it (yes even Otis Redding’s version) — should be the title.

(His “Cool Christmas Blues” is a legend in my house — his singing, phrasing, those piano riffs that were like champagne jazz flecked with big city mud.) If I want two albums to instantly transport all of my senses into Christmas/Holiday mode, it’s Brown’s “Cool Christmas Blues” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

In 2015 the list was 195 songs and 11 hours long. And yes, I put them in the order I wanted them heard. I’m wired that way.

The playlist is now 718 songs and 40 hours — and still growing (in fact, I was a slacker for a couple of years and didn’t add that much back then so it really should be longer, honestly). Still, 718 songs and 40 hours is something to feel pride in, especially because I’m not just slapping any old song on there (though as you listen it certainly may seem like that on occasion). But nope, I vet every song. Doesn’t mean I’m right, but I’m looking for something that’s either great or unique or unexpectedly lovely and touching or ridiculously funny. Every mood should be represented — but that representation should pass muster, at least with me (and I think we can agree that I take this fucking seriously or I wouldn’t have two insanely long public playlists).

Ah, yes, the other one.

In 2016 I wanted to create a winnowed-down playlist from “Merry Christmas, Baby” — not so much a greatest of the greatest but just simply something I could play in the car when driving, since I essentially listen to Christmas/Holiday music from post-dinner Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve (and then, without fail, hit the brakes hard for a cold stop).

So, in 2016 I wanted to have my favorites collected that were more upbeat and better for driving — “Silent Night” is not a tune for driving — and when I was curating that list it was pretty clear that the majority of songs were originals. I love a lot of the old chestnuts but sometimes I have to really be in the mood — “Little Drummer Boy” gets stale super easy (which is why I put the Bright Eyes version on the driving list, along with Jimi Hendrix’s ridiculously great instrumental medley of “Little Drummer Boy/Silent Night/Auld Lang Syne.” Hell, I can drive to those. Your mileage may vary.

That list is called: “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud.” It is 361 songs and 20 hours, as of the time I’m writing this.

(So, that’s roughly half of the “Merry Christmas, Baby” playlist but also gloriously, mind-blowingly long. And yes, it too started off as curated and in order. It starts with one of the greatest Christmas songs ever, “I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas,” about a heroin addict, by Aimee Mann. It’s going to sound, well, obsessive, but I spent a couple of days trying to settle on the first 10 songs on “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud.” It felt like an impossible task. I realized then that I deeply loved maybe 100 songs on that list and it was impossible to put them in order. These days I’ve stopped doing that because, well, yeah, it’s obsessive.

My advice is simple for both playlists: Absolutely use the shuffle function.

I confess now that some slower non-driving songs have crept in on “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud,” partly because one can get a little slack picking Christmas songs for two lists after searching and listening for hours on end, year after year. I also feel a little bit bad, for example, when I add five or seven songs from an exceptional compilation and don’t scramble those five or seven around to mix it up. I used to. (But, yeah, just use the shuffle and I don’t have to nitpick about what gets played when or follows what.)

I’m going to keep adding to both playlists, right through Christmas of this year, but wanted to get this updated playlist posted here on the Resounding feature as quickly as I could so that you and your friends and loved ones — feel free to share it widely — can just put either of them on and hit shuffle — you could play them for months without feeling repetitive. In the process you’ll find classics, some “new classics,” some shockingly great surprises and some really funny and/or ridiculous but catchy ones.

I even take the selection of those gimmicky ones seriously. In fact, this year I decided to include a song I originally rejected — with prejudice and authority — because I realized that I couldn’t stop laughing. That song is on “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud” and it’s an updated take on one of my most hated Christmas classics of all time — “Carol Of the Bells,” which is like aural torture — only this one is titled “Carol Of the Tubular Bells” and has a guy saying, with this perfectly sing-songy delivery, “don’t go insane/don’t go insane/don’t go insane” under the lyrics. So, yeah, had to have that.

(I realize, yes, that even though I have a handful of Hanukkah songs mixed in, my Jewish friends and others might think this list is just too, well, Christmasy, and they wouldn’t be wrong (even though a lot of Jews wrote tons of Christmas hits!). I look at Christmas songs from a secular perspective, particularly since I’m not religious at all. In fact, I find that the best songs are about moods that rise up in the season — often sad, complicated feelings. Christmas is kind of a mind-fuck even for someone who loves it, like me. The bar was set so high when we were very young children and believed in Santa. At some point, after those early glory years, Christmas never meets the expectations we have for it. In that sense, it’s always a letdown on some level. Toss in family, shopping, the complications of both, being isolated from the ones we love in the holidays, or not “feeling it” when it’s demanded of us, and what you get is a holiday that’s great for sad songs. And sad songs are the best songs).

Anyway, what hit me way back in 2015 during the initial construction of the main list was how steadfast I was in my opinions (I know, that shouldn’t have been a shocker given that I was once a music critic). For example, I believe that Solomon Burke’s “Silent Night” is the definitive version and can not be improved on even one bit. Every other version starts behind his. (Plus his “Presents For Christmas” (45 version) is a thing of real beauty).

To me, assembling that list hammered home some truisms: I’m not into the Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra school of classics, but I’m willing to listen to 67 versions of “White Christmas” and pick three keepers. That sort of thing. I believe that “Jingle Bells” is basically a dumb kids song so it’s a fucking miracle, pun intended, that Smokey Robinson and the Miracles made “Jingle Bells” tolerable. They made it an actual song. If you’ve got a better version I’m already highly dubious.

Same idea: Darlene Love and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” There are, no kidding, like 10 legitimately great covers of that song (a number of them are on these playlists) but they exist in another universe compared to hers. I mean, Love is so exceptionally great in this Christmas song genre that she even made “A Marshmallow World”— a heinously bad song — sound good, which is like voodoo magic.

I learned things like, how can “May Ev’ry Day Be Christmas,” from Irma Thomas and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band be her original and not from somewhere deep in the American Songbook? I mean, that song time-traveled into her mouth.

In the original construction of the “Merry Christmas, Baby” playlist, it was all about the stone cold classics. The more I listened to multiple versions my opinions began to harden. (By the way, do you know how many people have recorded “White Christmas”? No? That’s because nobody does — they haven’t built a computer that can crack the math on that). Sometimes a song like “White Christmas” and its 701 jabillion versions just breaks you. One begins to hate the song forever and ever and not care who did it best. Honestly, I don’t know or care who did it best. No opinion. Well, not right now — maybe after I see some of your suggestions in the comments I might.

But I will tell you this: Mahalia Jackson’s version of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” is the one. Lots of great competition — like hundreds of fantastic versions. Doesn’t matter. She wears the crown. Like Solomon Burke and “Silent Night,” I will not tolerate dissent.

At some point I thought, well, maybe everybody should just get “A Motown Christmas” and there would be no need for a playlist? That one would probably do just fine. But there is a need. Because I started running into things like, well, Marvin Gaye singing “Purple Snowflakes,” a cloying and not very good song that benefits from Gaye singing it but would also have been a great cover for Prince. And then I wanted to know about Prince’s Christmas songs. He did “Another Lonely Christmas” and I’ve spent years trying to contort myself into liking it. Had he covered “Purple Snowflakes” well, that would have been something. And now we’ll never know.

(Timely aside: “Happy New Year (Prince Can’t Die Again)” by Mac McCaughan is the greatest New Year’s song ever written. End of story. And yes, it’s on “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud.”)

I guess one compilation won’t cover it. You need a big net. I mean, The Supremes doing “Silver Bells” and The Ronettes doing “Sleigh Ride” are almost inarguably definitive, but not so much that I didn’t want to hear other versions and, pointedly, more modern versions. Could there be a better one? Sure. I mean, I love Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” better than Leonard Cohen’s original and for some people that’s like automatically a fist fight even without alcohol involved.

I quickly discovered that my preference was for non-classic holiday songs. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve always had a rule that says “a great Christmas album must have at least two, preferably three originals on there and at least two of them must be mind-blowing.” It showed that, as an artist, you were invested in, I don't know, the spirit of the enterprise, not just to make a buck.

Aimee Mann’s 2006 album “One More Drifter In the Snow” and “The Hotel Cafe Presents…Winter Songs” (2008) were super influential in my house. The latter’s first track, "Winter Song" is co-written and co-sung aby Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson. It’s a lovely (and not really Christmas-centric) song and a superb album. As for Mann, as stated previously, she’s already written one of my favorite original Christmas songs ever. So it all coalesced back then around finding excellent original seasonal songs if you will and learn to love them and sing them and make them part of my personal holiday tradition. I still love all those songs on both albums.

By the time I created “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud,” I loved more brilliantly off-kilter and creative non-traditional (non-seasonal?) songs than I did classics. Every year — including this one — I discovered some real gems that I know will be around every year (although, to be clear, some of the songs periodically get pulled off of Spotify for whatever reason and don’t appear on the playlist (they appear grayed out in mine). This year, Dave Ford’s savagely wonderful “Have Yourself A Bitter Little Christmas” is tragically missing, among a handful of others (like the dark “It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop” from Frightened Rabbit.

I’m always elated when I find what will become a lasting holiday classic for me — like The Staves “Home Alone, Too,” or Echosmith’s “I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day,” which kicks off the main playlist; Glasvegas, “A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss),” the soul-sonic “12 Days Of My 1970’s Christmas,” from Charlie Hines or something utterly ridiculous and funny like The Killers’ “Don’t Shoot Me Santa,” which I can never stop singing.

I found to my surprise that not only did Everything But the Girl have an excellent seasonal song but when Tracey Thorn went solo she wrote a fall-on-the-ground gem in “Tinsel and Lights.” I would suggest, if I may, that before hitting the “shuffle” option on either playlist, you play the first 10 songs in order, particularly on “Our Silent Nights Are Getting Loud,” which has a murderers row of future classics including “A Change At Christmas (Say It Ain’t So)” from The Flaming Lips which is a now a Goodman Extended Family mainstay.

All of that and so many others. And yes, there are “classics” from the modern era, too, like “Fairytale of New York” from The Pogues, a song that should never be covered (but has been, numerous times — including by Rostam, which I included on the list; I love Rostam but, wow, nobody should try that song).

OK, one final quick note: I created these playlists in Spotify. My good friend Jason Snell imported iterations of both to Apple Music and you can find them there (by searching for his name) as well.

I would be remiss in not ending this post without a shoutout to the band Low and drummer-singer Mimi Parker, who died Nov. 5 of cancer. She was 55. Parker and husband Alan Sparhawk — guitarist and singer of Low — have a few outstanding songs on both of these lists. But their song “Just Like Christmas” was a particular favorite of mine and my partner. It was one of the songs we knew had to be upfront when I first posted the playlist in 2015.

• You can hear 30 second snippets of each song by pressing play on either list.

I’ll keep curating these playlists. Hope you start and keep listening.