I haven’t planned it like this, but I seem to have been getting into a run of alternating quieter days with more raucous ones. So, to avoid any thought of getting myself into a rut, today is a day of variety. This will be a mix of two of my older favourites, plus a brand new one from a covers band I’ve shared with you earlier in the month. I like them all, and I hope you will, too!

I haven’t shared Joni Mitchell‘s music on the blog as much as I might have done, given that I have been a fan since her earliest days, and particularly of her early albums – from which this song comes:

An absolutely beautiful song, and the video of Snoopy and the Peanuts characters is such a perfect fit for it. I’ve shared this before, but it is so lovely that I just had to include it again. If you haven’t seen it before, do watch it to the end, as it has a subtle little life lesson for us. You probably already know that the song was on Joni’s Blue album, released in June 1971, and which I still think is her best album ever. Ten tracks, and they are all brilliant. The album peaked at #15 in the US, at #9 in her native Canada, but I’m pleased to say that we did best by it, as it reached #3 here in the UK. Fifty years ago, and it still sounds as fresh as ever. Joni suffered an aneurysm some years ago, which has severely affected her, but it is good to know she is still recognised for her music: she has received a  Grammy Award nomination for Best Historical Album, for her Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967) collection – the Awards’ winners will be announced on January 31, 2022 – and earlier this month she was one of this year’s honorees for the Kennedy Centre Honours. It seems that the US has adopted this Canadian as one of their own but she has been living there since 1965, to be fair! She looked frail at the event, but it was great to see her being able to accept the honour in person.

My second choice is a Christmas single released by my favourite live band. To back up my comment that I was mixing things up today, this takes us from the sublime to the (vaguely) ridiculous, but it is a lot of fun:

I’ve been to many of their shows, including a Christmas one, and they really are as anarchic as the video suggests. But if one of the purposes of music is to entertain, Bellowhead do it in huge amounts: no one ever leaves one of their shows feeling short-changed. If they were moving around too quickly for you to count, they have eleven members and describe themselves as a ‘folk big band.’ This was released as a non-album single in December 2013, with a re-recorded version of Jingle Bells on the B-side (as distinct from the version I shared on Day 6 of this series). It didn’t make the charts but, unusually for a folk act, four of their five albums have all been in the UK albums chart, two of them making it into the top twenty. This video is, as I said, a lot of fun, and I probably couldn’t have given you two more different ones!

I thought I’d give you a third song again today. On Day 1 I shared a video of a covers band I had found on YouTube, providing me with the first version of Wham‘s Last Christmas that I have actually liked. They have been releasing new Christmas videos weekly during Advent, and this is their latest:

The band, if you don’t remember them or missed the big logo at the beginning of that, is First To Eleven, and if you want to read more about them it is in the previous post, the link to which is above the video. If you have been following this series you may recall that on Day 9 I shared my all-time favourite version of this song, by Brynn Andre: do follow that link if you want to see that one again. I’m not saying that this is better, but I’ve really grown to like First To Eleven since I found them some months ago, and I think this is a rather sweet version of the song, with some great guitar work. And any excuse to see the cute Audra Miller again isn’t going to be missed by me!

That’s all for today’s songs. All that remains is to leave you with an image of the day Looking back, I think I’ve been really restrained with these, as I have a library of them which I probably wouldn’t put on here, ever! This one of the more borderline ones:

Well, it made me laugh, anyway! I’ll be back with some more good taste tomorrow, and a real bumper edition of songs – there will be five in all, three of which I’ve never shared before. Now there’s a treat you can’t afford to miss! See you then 🎁