Life and Life Only

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and May Joy Visit You Often In the Coming Days

Celeste Fremon
Written by Celeste Fremon

Some music, as is customary, to brighten your holiday hours.

This cover of Tom Waits’ “Come on up to the House” by Lukas Nelson (Willie’s kid) and his band, The Promise of the Real, premiered yesterday, Christmas Eve, 2020.

No, it’s not really a Christmas song, and none of us should be coming up to anyone’s houses right now, except virtually and metaphorically.

But, Lukas, who turned 35 this Christmas day, transforms the 1999 recording from Waits’ Mule Variations album, written with Kathleen Brennan, into something filled with ragged-edged compassion, which is perhaps exactly what is needed for Christmas 2020

Oh, and one more thing. Here’s is what Lukas Nelson posted on Instagram two days ago on December 23, 2020,

It is a quick, stay-at-home version of Pretty Paper, the beautiful Christmas song that his dad, Willie Nelson, wrote in 1963, and which Roy Orbison first made famous in the years before Willie became Willie, and he still sold his songs to anyone who’d buy ’em.

Finally — just because — here is a traditional Christmas song, recorded in 2017, by Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires singing Silent Night in Nashville with the East Nashville Magnet High School choir.

Merry Christmas. And happy listening.

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