Rock Flashback: The Moody Blues’ “December”
(Getty Images/Karl-Joseph Hildenbrand/AFP)
Earlier this month, we mentioned The Jethro Tull Christmas Album and how well the band’s folk-inflected style lends itself to holiday music. Find out about another holiday album that’s a perfect match for the band performing it.
By 2003, the Moody Blues were well into a second decade of existing mostly as a touring band playing their greatest hits with orchestras around the country. They were down to a trio — Justin Hayward, John Lodge, and Graeme Edge — and had released only one studio album since 1991. For many bands, this combination of circumstances leads to a Christmas album, and it did for the Moodys. And like it did for Tull, a Christmas album proved to be the best Moody Blues album in years.
December has everything that old-school Moody Blues fans love — rich instrumentation, gorgeous melodies, and lyrics that communicate how life, in its best moments, can be a beautiful thing. It’s short on traditional songs, although it does include versions of “White Christmas,” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and “When a Child Is Born,” the latter a song better-known in Europe than in the States. There’s a version of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” too.
The two best tracks on the album may be a bit sugary for non-Moodys fans, but those people have probably stopped reading by now anyhow. There’s “A Winter’s Tale,” which was a big UK hit for David Essex in 1982.
Best of all is “December Snow,” a song about love and memory that leaves me wrecked every time I hear it.
December is the kind of warm, peaceful record you want to put on at this time of year. Who knew?
Experience more Rock Flashbacks.
Post originally published at WNEW | Where Rock Lives. Recent headlines from WNEW | Where Rock Lives:
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