ORB: A Collection of Christmas Oldies

A Collection of.... Christmas Oldies?

Gee whiz, two Christmas releases in a row? Who are we? Christmas Company?!

Well, uh, no, you see, we had stuff planned for 2024, but none of it really came together, and by the end of the year, life got busy for everyone. 

I wanted to put something out though, so five days before Christmas... I started to put together all the Christmas-related recordings that we had for a possible Christmas compilation record, but I decided that we needed to put in at least a couple of new tracks, so that's exactly what I did.

So from the "Cellophane vault", I got the tapes for "Monkey" and a jam that became "Yuletide '22".

The S.S. Holiday

If you follow the group you will remember this "golden oldie" from 2022. 

It was a song that Domm and I wrote together in early December of that year, it's one of the few mostly "live" tracks that we've released so far.

For this particular mix, I wanted to make it as "pure" as possible to sound like it did when we recorded it, so I removed a lot of the ADT effect on our vocals that was on the original mix.

If you'd like to read more about this song, you can check out the S.S. Holiday page here.

[I'm Having] A Toasty Little Christmas

This one was previously released as well, I still love that goofy chord progression.

Check out the original release HERE.

The only major difference is that my lead vocal was restored into the mix, whereas Rokudai only sang the lead on the original release.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Finally, one of the "new" tracks, the basic backing track for this one was started back in 2022 but beyond that, I never did much with it.

I didn't use all of the lyrics of the original traditional version, only certain parts, kinda like how Brian Wilson did with Ol Man River.

Monkey / Moanin' Dronin' Christmas Time (Medley)

This one has HISTORY...

Funnily enough, when Cellophane Company was in its wonky "prototype" stage, before Domm joined, the first thing I ever did was a limited release to friends, which was... a Christmas album haha.

One of those tracks happened to be "Monkey".

Fast forward to when we were making our 2022 Christmas EP... Domm and I started reworking the track for inclusion, but unfortunately were never able to finish it due to Domm's condition at the time.

Once again fast forward to 2024, I had a song called "Moanin' Dronin' Christmas Time" that I had written for this new compilation, referring to the fact that there seem to be drones/who knows what floating all over the USA now, but I quickly realized that with less than a week left for this compilation and with most of the other tracks that still needed to be mixed, there was no way I was going to get this done in time.

So what I did was just take the chorus from it and tack it onto the unfished 2022 version of "Monkey" and it turned out well, total chaos of a track but hey, it seems Christmas time always brings a bit of chaos.

S.S. Holiday (One Year Later)

This was from the previous Christmas release, nothing of note was changed.

See the original page for this song HERE.

Yuletide '22

This is probably my favorite track on the album, it truly felt like collaborating with Domm again.

Domm's dialogue was from the 2022 "A Fireside Questionnaire (With Domm)" session, it seems his words are still very relevant to this day.

The instrumentation was a combination of me playing electric guitar/keyboards with Band In a Box, I love how it ended up sounding.

Vibe

Just a short snippet from the ending of the 2022 Christmas EP that I liked.

In the end, I really liked how it turned out, it was like all three of us were really together again.

With this year finally over, hopefully, there is something refreshing, positive, and new on the horizon.