Dylan & Sting Go to the Mattresses: You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine

Back in the day, oh, say about a year ago, when I was still shlepping my younger teenage daughters to middle school, there was a Fixed Rule of Conduct in the car: No fighting and no Christmas music until after Halloween at the earliest. Once they were back in school for the year, as soon as the first chilly days of autumn, no matter how early in October they occurred, someone would trot out the Rat Pack Christmas album, and we would start grooving to Dean, Frank, Sammy and company singing Winter Wonderland or some such. Well, the November 1 rule changed all of that.

Still, I guess there is something about the passing of the harvest moon, when the leaves turn crimson and gold, that makes you want to reach out for the hot cocoa and cool scarf and the Rat Pack Christmas album. Since your teenage (and older) children are the first to call you on adult hypocrisy, I have been eagerly clutching my copy the Bob Dylan Christmas of the Heart album, ready to give it a listen this weekend. I also noted that Sting likewise has a Christmas album out as well, “..If on a Winter’s Night” that I am also looking forward to giving a spin.

In the meantime, the release of the Dylan and Sting Christmas albums are generating a little action and – since it is the music biz—competition, as evidenced in this review from the interesting and enjoyably written cultural blog, “Things I’d Rather Be Doing” via Expecting Rain:

“Even those of us who cringe at any bit of treacle in our music can at least tolerate a bit of goodwill and cheer (and sappiness) when it comes to Christmas music. Sting takes the opposite tack, however, offering the perfect soundtrack for the ascetic atheist winter carnival of one. It is at times beautiful, but it doesn't seem to have a place.

Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart, meanwhile, is the sign of an artist who gets it. No one expected this from Dylan, of course, particularly given the creative hot streak he has been on over the past decade-plus. But, like Sting, Dylan is one who seems to revel in subverting expectations…”

G-d bless us, Every One!

--Brooklyn Beat