A Not-So-Silent Night

This is one of my favorite songs on the CD: Silent Night. It is maybe a little more upbeat than your traditional Silent Night. Shelley Johnson plays cello on two of the songs: O Holy Night, and Silent Night. I love both of those. It was interesting, though… O Holy Night took me about eight hours to put together my idea into a song. Silent Night took one take. Yes, one take. The difference is that Rachel was here for the idea phase of Silent Night. Basically, we just improvised. I played what came to me, and Rachel sang along. At one point at the end, I was coming back around for the tag at the end, and I called out, okay, last line again! She sang it, and then we looked at each other and said, “Okay, that was kind of cool… let’s hear it back!” We listened, and apart from a couple sour notes on my part, it was kind of cool, and we decided to go with it… exactly as it was. Well, minus the couple of sour notes. Then I went back and added the cello part, and Shelley made it sing. When I started playing around with O Holy Night, I had an idea what I wanted, but I knew that I wanted it to be just piano and cello, and the improvising was ever so much more difficult, since I would play what I heard, but then I had to play the cello with it, and it wouldn’t work the way I wanted, so I would have to try again… over and over and over and… you get the idea.

Anyway, you have no idea how tempted I am to put Silent Night up for you to hear. But I am resisting the urge. You have bought a CD, and you deserve some fun surprises. Which surprises, by the way, arrive on Wednesday the 18th! I can hardly believe it.

The painting is Liz Lemon Swindle’s beautiful Silent Night.