In 2022, I wrote and recorded my first Christmas song – Sing for Joy (At Christmas). I re-posted it here this year for easy access. The Sing for Joy project was so much fun that I decided to do another one for 2023 – Promise Me (You’ll Be Home For Christmas).
Sing For Joy is upbeat Christian Contemporary fare, but Promise Me is a Christmas love song — pure “70’s singer/songwriter” ...with maybe a certain additional level of meaning, if you want to find it.
Promise Me is based on a little guitar riff that I fumbled around with in 2010, intending to write (what would then have been) my first Christmas song. Of course, I set it aside and forgot it existed, much like hundreds of other such song ideas that come and go like the back ends of fireflies on an evening in June. Fortunately, over the years I’ve become better about committing these little Messages from the Muse to some sort of media so that I don’t forget them. How did amateur musicians who can’t read music ever survive without cell phones? Yes, cassettes, I know — and I have a couple boxes of them to prove it. But… so clunky. Remember fast-forward? Yuck.
Speaking of fast-forward… Fast-forward to 2023. My music recording hard drive crashed this fall (aaarrrghhhh!!!) — but, no worries, I was able to recover most of the files. As a kind of enforced bonus, I ended up re-organizing thousands of files. Among the many long-forgotten bits was that guitar riff from 2010.
I realized immediately that I had a head start on this year’s Christmas song. The rest of the music, and all of the lyrics, came together in a few hours one weekend in late October. I quickly developed a second guitar part to complement the first, recorded them and sent them off to my recording partner and dear friend from college, Peter Curtiss. Peter liked what he heard and came up with a beautiful piano part to complement the guitars.
Peter’s original recording of the piano part made it through the production process mostly untouched, and is what you hear here. The funny thing is that it had a mistake — a single note with an unpleasant dissonance against one of the guitar parts. After realizing what happened, Peter wanted to re-record his part, but I told him to hold off on that. Turns out that I loved his “mistake” — rather than change what Peter did, I decided to change the guitar parts to match his part. You can hear it in the song, but it is difficult to pick out because, well, it doesn’t sound like a mistake anymore. If anything, it elevated the song quite a bit. Thank you Peter. Please make more mistakes in the future.
Although Promise Me is very different from Sing For Joy, it does borrow a small part of a chord progression. As I write more Christmas songs in the coming years (God willing), I thought it might be nice to connect them in some way from year to year. So this year’s connection is the descending chord trio of Bm → BbMaj7 → [A], which also appears in Sing For Joy. Technically, the “A” is A7sus here and Am7 in Sing for Joy, but it’s the same basic idea. I’ve always liked that particular progression.
With Peter’s part in hand, I spent a couple weekends assembling the final recording. It’s all me except Peter’s piano. Also, many thanks to my nephew and audio wizard, Jim Marchione, for helpful comments on various mixes, without which this would not sound nearly as good as it does. Seriously, he is one of the most talented audio engineers you’ll find outside of the major music centers around the country.
The song is about a person whose true love has been away for a time, and whose life in the interim has been bleak and hollow (per the chorus). The arrangement is simple, but there is purpose behind it. In lieu of drums or heavy percussion, I used sleigh bells as a rhythm component, particularly in the hopeful, “Christmassy” sections. The sleigh bells temporarily change to a starker “tap tap tap” in the darker-themed chorus, and evolve again, albeit very briefly, into a “thump” — a heartbeat borne of anticipation, before the song returns to the joy and hope of the sleigh bells. There’s a larger allegory there too, for those who choose to see it.
The song begins and ends with a brief musical phrase that I arranged to evoke a twinkling star. Christmas is magic to many of us. I hope the magic of the Christmas star shines bright in your life throughout this holiday season. Merry Christmas!
Promise Me (You’ll Be Home For Christmas)