Fire and Water Records: A Very Daly Christmas Volume 6

6 responses to “Fire and Water Records: A Very Daly Christmas Volume 6”

1. Great show, Ryan and Neil.  I like to call them fantasti-questions but that’s just me. I LOVED Old Fashioned Christmas. Never heard that rendition before, and it’s great! 

   Regarding gifts, my parents used to put together a big present if there was one. I remember coming down the stairs to see the Death Star “fully functional” which is probably my favorite Christmas gift alongside the time I got a blue and yellow Huffy bike. 

   100% right on Taylor wanting Kansas City’s season over quick. Some of it is freeing Travis up for the holidays and the other part is she’s tired of pretending to be friends with Patrick Mahomes’ wife. Guarantee she cheered when Mahomes blew his knee out on Sunday. 

   Great question about Christmas-adjacent songs. Angel of Harlem is definitely on the list, along with Billy Joel’s She’s Right on Time, My Favorite Things from Sound of Music, and of course, Pop that P*ssy by 2 Live Crew. 

   Finally, my list:
   Nutmeg by John Legend/Stephen Colbert
   What a Year for a New Year by Dan Wilson
   I’ll be Home for Christmas by Tony Bennet
   Fairytale of New York by the Pogues
   Jingle Bells by Bing Crosby (w/ Andrews Sisters)
   Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow! by Frank Sinatra

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2. Wonderful show as always, Daly Bros.

   I was actually aware of/a fan of more songs than usual here. I jokingly break into Merle Haggards “If We Make It Through December” for various reasons that month every year. As much as I love Christmas, we’ve had some horrible experiences in that month. Beloved family members dying, life-altering illnesses diagnosed, all days before Christmas. Yet somehow, it’s still my favorite time of year…this side of Halloween.

   We took Cindy’s young nephew to see A Muppet Christmas Carol in theaters when it was released. He ate too much popcorn and candy and threw up everywhere, so we didn’t have the best experience. I watched it again when our kids were young, and it’s really grown on me. I know a lot of folks consider it THEIR version of the story. Nothing wrong with that! It’s on Disney Plus, by the way.

   I love the Bowie/Crosby duet, but Bob Rivers did one of his famous Christmas parodies of it, called “Rummy Rocker Boy” with Bing and an Ozzy-like metal singer.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42bf-8gut34

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   1. Oh, and all that about Merle Haggard going to prison and being in San Quentin when Johnny Cash did his show is 100% true.

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3. Great show gentlemen! Regarding the tie in with the Hallmark Channel and the Kansas City Chiefs, you do realize Hallmark is headquartered in Kansas City? Gotta support the home town team. Not a Kansas City resident or a football fan, but I do have way too much useless knowledge stored away in my nerd brain.

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4. I’ve done my Grinch bit five times now, so we can move past that to brief comments. I do have Christmas songs that I’m affectionate about, but since I haven’t been affectionate about Christmas itself in decades, nothing new really imprints. Most of this year’s list was either new or new to me, so… yeah. I’m not sure where I was first exposed to the Bing Crosby/David Bowie duet, but I wanted to say it was a bloopers show that only featured a clip to point out the oddity of the pairing. I mostly knew Bowie as an actor then, and never cared for Crosby, so I was basically like “that sounded crap.” I doubt that I’ve ever heard/watched the whole thing.

   I’m not as reverent of Merle Haggard as Neil’s friends, mostly because he didn’t stand out as much vocally from all the other AM country stars that I grew up listening to. I like him better in retrospect, even if his politics were all over the place, but in the end he was a Highwayman (again, and again, and again, and again…) He just never had a solo song that really bowled me over. When he did make something that clearly stood apart, it was “Natural High,” which sounded like an adult contemporary crossover bid, and a precursor to country going pop (and my going elsewhere for my music.) Haggard was at the forefront of the Outlaw Country wave, so I figure at least some of those legends about him were true. “If We Make it Through December” feels very much like the lived experience of my childhood, and my maternal grandmother dying was pretty much the end of Christmas in our household. A lot of the holiday cheer we managed was up to her, and her absence really exposed the deficits of my parents, and the birth of my deep resentment toward them. The holiday itself was maybe a casualty, although the conditional, transactional nature of its practice on my father’s side surely fed into my cynicism.

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   1. Haggard was friends with most of them, but he was not a Highwayman. That was Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. Maybe he was like the Phantom Stranger, and never officially joined?

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