A #SaturdaySong Revisit – A Little Late For December

One of the songs which I often feature in my seasonal selections for December got left out this year: I’m not sure why, but it missed out on both my Advent Calendar and New Year songs. It is one that I have included in my defunct-ish #SaturdaySongs series and I thought that, while I am still only a month late with it, I would squeeze it in for one of my occasional returns to that series. I’ll share the original post, from 3 December 2016, and then return with a couple of updates. This is:

#SATURDAYSONGS No.7 – EVERY DECEMBER SKY

As we move into December I thought I’d devote my #SaturdaySongs this month to the month itself and to Christmas. I love this time of year, and always have done ever since I was a child. Call me naïve but I really believe that there is an added warmth to human spirit in this month, probably as a counter to the falling temperatures! I’ve often posted in previous years, showing videos of favourite Christmas songs and my own reviews of that year’s crop of Christmas TV ads. No ads this year though: I haven’t yet seen one that I like and I wouldn’t want to fill a post with expletives! But I may be posting a few more Christmas songs – possibly on days other than Saturdays too!

My first December choice is this one:

In this country Beth Nielsen Chapman is sadly underrated, but she has written some of the most beautiful songs of the past 20 years. This one was on her 2002 album “Deeper Still.” To my shame I’d not heard of her before but was introduced to her music, as with so many other artists, by the national treasure that is Bob Harris – Whispering Bob, as he has been known since his early 70s days on the Old Grey Whistle Test TV show. In the early 00s his weekly show on BBC Radio 2 ran from 10pm till 1am on a Saturday evening, and as I was often engaged in Dad’s Taxi duties at that time I managed to listen to quite a lot of them. So it was on a December evening in 2002 (21st December, to be precise) when I was sitting in my car, in the car park of the pub/restaurant where my older daughter had a Saturday job as a waitress. Bob played this and something about the beauty of the song, blended with a cold, clear, frosty night, entranced me from the outset. I bought the album, which remains a favourite to this day, along with many other of Beth’s releases. The male voice, by the way, is John Prine, whose music also deserves more attention than it receives.

Continuing the Bob Harris connection of this song for me, fast forward 9 years to 2011. I had been diagnosed with depression in October of that year, and was finding it difficult to do the basic daily stuff. I’m still not sure how I did it but I tweeted Bob a request that he play this song on his Saturday night programme. By then the BBC had shunted him back to a midnight-3am slot and, as luck would have it, in 2011 these were the first three hours of Christmas Day. Bob had put out a call on Twitter for suggestions for music for his programme, and took the trouble to reply to my slightly cheeky tweet – I promised I’d listen to the show if he played this – with the words ‘Deal! Beth’s in!’

We both kept our promise, as you can see from the screenshot from his amazing website. I listened and enjoyed three hours of magical music, and somehow the restorative powers of music helped me get through a difficult time. It is no coincidence that music is used as a therapy in mental health treatments: in addition to entertaining us it can do so much to help our mood. Like many of Beth’s songs, this one contains a real message of hope, and that is what I think I took from it, even on the first listen. I hope you like it as much as I do.

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I can give another update on the Bob Harris connection with this song. He again asked for suggestions for his seasonal show in 2016, and he got another tweet from me suggesting this one, which I finished by saying to him “go on, you know you want to,” after requesting the song. Imagine my surprise when he read out my tweet as his intro to it – my fifteen seconds of fame had finally arrived, on national radio! I got another name check at the end of the song, too. It is but a small thing in the great scheme of life, but to hear your name and tweet read out on air by a man you have respected for so many years does rather bring a warm glow, even at that crazy hour of the night!

To show how life moves on, that schoolgirl I was taking home nineteen years ago is now a senior lecturer, a published author, and the mother of my two granddaughters. I can never hear this song without thinking back to that first time I heard it – that is part of the beauty of music for me, and why it is so important for me and my blog. I may be a little behind the season with this, but the power, beauty and message of this lovely song deserve to be heard at any time.