Seasonal music – another good reason for the season

If you’d have said to me when I was a young adult that I’d be enjoying Christmas music later in my life, I would probably have laughed at you.

But here I am, it’s 2019 and I have many Christmas albums and it feels untrue how we develop and change. Now, it has to be said that any fascination for Christmas I had when I was younger had been turned right around by the time I hit my teens and in the intervening years some remarkable transitions have taken place in my life. These have caused me to re-evaluate why Christmas should be celebrated – and celebrated in a totally different way. But, back then I had exactly one Christmas-flavoured record. It revolved at 45rpm and had one song on each side. Now, I have more than thirty albums of seasonal music – mostly songs of faith and about the birth of Jesus but some that are just about the festival and carry their own joy.

This list may come too late for you to listen to them but at least it gives you some time to add to your own collection before next year. It is the nearer the day when the true love brought five gold rings than the day when we celebrate the birth of the Messiah – so perhaps you’ll find some jewels here for 2020:-

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Steely Dan – “The People Request”

Who: Steely Dan

Where: The Beacon Theatre, Manhattan, New York City, USA

When: 21st October 2018

What: By Popular Demand

On the first days of booking tickets for this “popular demand” show, ticket-buyers were asked by Ticketmaster to write-in their requests for songs to be featured. Now those who booked on the first day were probably (for the most part) die-hard Dan fans who had in mind songs that they had seldom heard before. But if this was the case then, there was little evidence of it in the set that emerged with this more closely resembling a “Greatest Hits” show than two-hours of rarities and deep cuts. Now that is not to say that this wasn’t a wonderful show to see. This band are tighter than they have ever been. Older bands like this either barely tolerate being on the stage as each other (look at the recent Fleetwood Mac debacle) or they have grown close and closer still through years of musical and personal inter-action. The latter is the case with Steely Dan

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Music: The principal of pleasure (1978-1980)

A guy that I’ve met wrote a list on Facebook which has been running ’round my head for the last few hours. Quite a simple idea really – the albums he was listening to in his teenage years. It sparked something within me and took me back to another time and so I’m up in the night writing a list of my own but also exploring things that in some ways I’d rather not think about it – a very different time – and some things I guess I’d rather forget.

But in the midst of it there was always music.

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Already Gone – A Natural Progressions Update

Glenn Frey

When I was at High School he seemed like the coolest guy on the whole planet.

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Natural Progressions Update – Summer 2015

A little update on all things Eagles.

The latest leg of the “The History of the Eagles” tour came to an end on the 29th of July in the U.S. with a gig in Louisiana. The tour has been more of the same  – if you liked the last couple of years you would have liked this. The band is now being put to bed for a while whilst the members turn their attention to solo projects.

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Natural Progressions: The History of a Long Flight

Who:           Eagles

Where:        o2 Arena, Greenwich, London

When:         16-21 June 2014

Something had made Don Henley slightly annoyed. “We don’t do this because we’re bored”, he informed the audience at the o2 arena in Greenwich.

In an interview two weeks before, Robert Plant had been informing the press why he wouldn’t join a Led Zeppelin reunion that Jimmy Page had suggested. Some old bands go back out on tour because they’re bored, he suggested, and he wanted no part of that. And then he went on to specifically mention the Eagles and Don Henley had obviously heard the reports.

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What’s coming up in 2014?

Thank you to everyone who visits and supports this site. We now get more visitors per day than ever before. We get twice as many visitors per day just reading old stuff as we used to get on the old site on a day when a new article went up.

So a couple of weeks into the New Year, what seems to be likely to appear here in 2014 and what else will I be involved in?

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Natural Progressions Update – Eagles in 2013/2014

Well, most of our readers who follow the newspaper advertisements or internet will know that Eagles are touring the UK and Europe in 2014. What do we know about that tour?

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