By Jim Fusco:
Okay, this one was for fun, and I implore you- just for fun! I was planning on doing this one all day. I needed one more Christmas song before the big day and I’ve always enjoyed singing this one. For the most part, I can sing the whole song without going into falsetto. Of course, I usually have to project (a nicer word for scream) when I sing this song, so it was nicer to be in a quiet environment.
This was a LANDMARK day for the Laptop Sessions- we reached our highest view total yet for one day- 263 visitors! Thank you to all who came to the site today and we sincerely hope you’ll continue to come back. There are no plans of stopping here on the best music video blog in the universe. Every time I say that, I think of those TV political news shows. They always claim they have the “Best political team…” and then add: on television, in America, in the world, in the solar system, in the universe, of all time…
“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is the perfect album closer to probably the best Christmas album of all time- “A Christmas Gift For You from Phil Spector”. That album was so innovative and actually featured GOOD original songs in a holiday mood. Everyone whose been reading this blog for a while knows that I’m a fan of great album closers. I hate when a band just shoves some plain old solo acoustic number at the end of the album. It’s always such a downer and makes you long for Track 1 all over again. Tonight’s song is one of those album closers that gets you goin’ again! Plus, it’s the best song on the album, which is a rarity being right at the end. I do need to point out that after this song, there is a special “Silent Night” track wiht a Christmas message from a very wimpy sounding Phil Spector, so that’s technically the closing track. But not until I got the album on CD (we just always listened to a compilation of a hundred great Christmas songs my father put together) did I even know that track existed. And, I shouldn’t have doubted my father’s choice to leave it off of his compilation- that track stinks.
Darlene Love’s vocals are just great on this track. I hope I didn’t miss her singing this song on David Letterman this year. She always sings it and she still sounds great. Although, the pitch of the song has dropped down considerably over time.
I guess this song tonight just proves that I will go to great lengths to sing songs in the original key. You may have noted that I sang the high parts in my last Christmas music video (Happy Xmas, War is Over) in a lower octave, albeit in the same key. But, as always, I had a reason for that rare exception to my hard-and-fast rule. Singing that part in the high register just sounded WAY too much like Yoko Ono, so I decided to salvage the song by taking Yoko out of the equation completely! 🙂
Enjoy tonight’s cover song music video. I’m very excited, of course, for Christmas. I know Chris and Jeff will make you proud with their holiday offerings over the next two days. I can’t wait to see what I got, but more importantly, to see the reactions on the faces of people I got gifts for. This is shaping up to be a nice Christmas. I won’t talk to you until after the holiday, so I wish everyone the very best and I thank you all for such a great and exciting year!