“Christmas Songs” week continues today with the Parzen Family Singers holiday ditty from last year, “Why Can’t It Be Christmas Every Day Of The Year?” sung by Lila Jane and Georgia.

That’s a photo of the sisters, below, from earlier this year when the weather was still warm enough for them to perform their “pandemic flash mob” concerts on the street outside our house.

They go to a music magnet elementary school. Across our neighborhood, at the same time each week, kids from their music program would set up and play songs from their Suzuki Method books for neighbors. It was a program organized by Lila Jane’s awesome cello teacher, who’s also our good friend.

The health crisis has been so tough on kids, our own girls included. But music has been such a great balm for them: They both take piano lessons, Georgia plays violin and guitar, and Lila Jane plays cello. And on many weekends, we jam together, write songs, and I teach them about the recording arts (something I enjoy immensely).

All the photos in the video above are from last year. It was wonderful to revisit them and to remember what life was like at our house before the pandemic. It’s still going to take a while but it will be like that again…

I hope that their song and video can bring a little bit of sunshine into your lives today. Thanks for listening. And Merry Christmas from the Parzen Family!

“Christmas Songs” week continues on the blog today with a Christmas song I wrote together with my Nous Non Plus bandmates in 2011. At the time, Tracie and I were still living in Austin where we wrote, performed, and produced our album “Freudian Slip” (a track from that record recently appeared in “Emily in Paris”).

Austin music legend David Garza helped us produce the album and played on nearly all of the tracks. Another Austin great, Kyle Thompson, played drums.

The song was inspired by a Southern Californian blogger who called herself “Marines Girl.” Tracie and I followed her as she wrote about what it was like to be married to someone who was stationed overseas.

My loyal and ever-ready bandmates, always ready to embrace my crazy ideas, lovingly helped me flesh out my original idea for the song. It’s one of the few English-language tracks we ever recorded and David plays an amazing guitar solo on it.

I’ll never forget the moment we played it for our record company: They were like, “you wrote a sad Christmas song?” Needless to say, they refused to release it.

But it’s one of my all-time favorites from our catalog and I loved writing, performing, and recording it.

Those are lead singers Céline and Jean-Luc with David in the photo below (at EAR studio where we did most of the live tracking).

Here’s a short clip of us rehearsing with David and Kyle in our living room in Austin. Most of the band was stayed with us while we were making the album and we did some of the tracking in my home studio. It was one of those really great times in our lives. Tracie and I were still newlyweds and we were just beginning to try to start a family…

And here are some random images from Nous Non Plus over the years.

I sure miss those times but it’s also wonderful to listen to these songs. It’s like each one captures a moment, a memory, and a feeling that could have only happened at that particular place and time.

Thanks for letting me share it with you here. And I hope you like the track. Merry Christmas, everyone!

From the department of “you can talk about your Donald Trumps and Rush Limbaughs”…

Like every songwriter who happens to be a nice Jewish boy from a nice Jewish family (read: my mother’s other sons are both lawyers), it’s always been a lifelong dream of mine to write a great Christmas song.

In keeping with the holiday spirit this year (and with the knowledge that so many of you are stuck at home chained to a computer screen and thus might be more open to some hokey Christmas jingle divertissement than in a normal year), today I’m sharing one of my favorite roasted chestnuts, “Nothing Good Rhymes with Santa Klaus,” a song I wrote, performed, and recorded with our friend and writer extraordinaire Gwendolyn Knapp in Houston in 2018.

December 2018, you ask? It feels like a lifetime since we wrote the lines:

I read the Sunday Papers about the world’s faux pas
You can talk about your Donald Trumps and your Rush Limbaughs
When you’re eating at your drunk in-laws
Talkin’ ’bout the war on Santa Klaus

Please note that the plural of faux pas is pronounced foe paws.

That’s me and Gwendolyn, below, playing a gig as The Go Aways (iTunes link for our one album released) in the time before the time of the pandemic and what a good time it was.

Thanks for being here, thanks for listening (and for helping to make my childhood dream come true), and most importantly, MERRY CHRISTMAS YA’LL!

More good Christmas music (well, I guess “good” is a relative term) is on its way!