[MUSIC] Annie Lennox, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"

[rfmcdonald]

I wasn't planning to buy Annie Lennox's A Christmas Cornucopia because her 2007 Songs of Mass Destruction left me mostly cold, her shimmering "Coloured Bedspread" aside. Songs of Mass Destruction seems to have left her record company cold, too; A Christmas Cornucopia, released on Island, is the first album she released since Lennox left Sony amid a certain amount of fuss. The September announcement of the holiday album's impending release, that staple of established stars with nothing to say, left me uninspired. But then, via Facebook's David, I heard her cover of "God rest you merry, gentlemen", with her typical sheen--good vocals, interesting instrumentation--and felt back into line.

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I like the album; I've certainly heard it enough. She does bring something new to the songs she covers, personally familiar to North American Anglophone me or not. What? Apart from her musical talents, she brought her philosophy about the season, something she revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on the making of the album. Christmas isn't just all sweetness and light; Christmas is more complex, and scary, and important than that.

The flip side of the Christmas season is pretty dark: Packed department stores and crowded high streets juxtaposed with homeless people wearing Santa hats in the freezing cold.

In a way, my choice of carols for “A Christmas Cornucopia” reflects the duality of the season. One song I recorded, “Lullay Lullay (The Coventry Carol),” is a tender lullaby of a mother to a child, but, looking deeper, the essential issue is actually infanticide.

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I love Christmas trees and bright lights and all the celebration. But I see a world that is sometimes mad, leaderless, and compassionless to children. All those themes are part of the Christmas story—such as the hunting of the Christ child by King Herod—and part of the caroling tradition. It’s there in my thinking as I’m creating a recording. There’s a film in mind and it goes from child soldiers to Macy’s department store.

If you go to London (where I live), you will see a Victorian church more or less on every corner, just like you see a Starbucks on every block of any city these days. And you subsequently get the sense that the church, in decades and centuries past, was packed on a Sunday, morning, noon and night. It was the glue of society, and the moral arbiter of the day.

Carols like “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” feature religious and royal images of angels and kings—-but most of us don’t have those mental pictures running through our heads anymore. Yet we have a longing to return to other, traditional scenes of Christmastime: horse-drawn carriages in the snow-covered streets, families coming together round a tree. In our hearts we’re children, really, and we want the world to be a better place. We want it to be shiny and we want it to have brightly colored lights. And when we see children, we recognize the wonder they feel about life and the world is something we might have lost, but we yearn to keep it safe for them.

Lennox's best songs, as a solo artist or with the Eurythmics, had an awareness of this dangerous ambivalence at their core. Her "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" brings authentic passion and meaning back to that powerful verse:

God rest you merry, Gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
Remember Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this Day.
To save poor souls from Satan's power,
Which long time had gone astray.
Which brings tidings of comfort and joy.

The song--and its sentiments--matter. Kudos to her for this.