Indie-darling and violin-virtuoso Andrew Bird had initially released his Christmas album Hark! in late-2019 as just a six-song EP. He had dropped the much more politically-incendiary My Finest Work Yet earlier that year^[1]An album I could also wax far too rhapsodic about: first single “Bloodless” openly calls our current political situation “a new civil war” that is only “bloodless for … Continue reading, bringing him his greatest acclaim since Noble Beast^[2]My personal favorite Bird album, FWIW. a decade earlier in 2009; the Christmas stuff was more just a fun little side-project, a victory lap, a way to cut loose and decompress after doing something much more “important.” He also said in interviews that he had been rediscovering Vince Guaraldi’s deservedly-iconic A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, and so had recorded violin covers of “Skating” and “Christmas is Coming” in homage. He also threw on a couple originals, an all-whistling cover of “O Holy Night,” and a minimalist “White Christmas” that owed more to Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions than Bing Crosby. Overall, a nice little lark for the Holidays.

Then COVID-19 swept the country just a few months later, and suddenly Christmas music didn’t seem like such a little lark anymore.

In response, he wrote and recorded the melancholy “Christmas in April” in April of 2020 (natch), billing it as the first “COVID” song of the era. It’s a song about not being able to get together for the holidays; because even in the Spring of that year, he could already see–despite all the talk about this being just a “two-week” lockdown–that this pandemic wasn’t going to end anytime soon, let alone by the end of the year, especially given the botched Federal response under Trump, as well as the low rates of masking and social-distancing among his supporters. Indeed, at the rate we were going, we wouldn’t be able to get together again the following April, either.^[3]A reminder that New Zealand did a total 8-week lockdown Spring of 2020, and were back to packing sports stadiums and concert venues by the summer. But then, Jacinda Ardem was competent. It is … Continue reading

Lyrically, Bird makes no direct reference to the pandemic, though he does mention (with wild understatement) all the proverbial “Fits and starts, upset apple carts” that are “Conspiring to keep us apart” (to put it mildly). He also, in the chorus, says he’s “hoping these words don’t ring so hollow when you hear me say/Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.” He knows not to take Christmas get-togethers for granted anymore, especially during a year that killed off a half-million Americans alone.^[4]Don’t @ me about this: from 2017-2019, the annual death count in America was consistently in the 2.8 million range; in 2020 it suddenly spiked to 3.3 million (and did not return to pre-COVID levels … Continue reading Bird then also threw on a few more well-curated covers^[5]e.g. “Andalucia” by John Cale, “Souvenirs” by John Prine, “Mille Cherubini in Coro” by Schubert, “Auld Lang Syne” by Robert Burns, etc.., and swiftly expanded Hark! into a 12-song LP—just in time for the Christmas 2020 season, when all his prophecies came true. Hark! has been on my Christmas playlist ever since.

Because it’s so important to actively remember! There was a lot of chatter in 2020 I recall, about how the pandemic was going to change “everything”–that all schools and work meetings would become remote-live forever, that we would face-mask forever, that the tourism and hospitality industry would collapse–that it would be this generation’s 9/11, that we would always remember.

However, even at the time, I deeply feared that it would be the opposite–that because the pandemic could not be easily exploited and monetized by the military-industrial complex like 9/11 was, it would be quickly repressed from our collective memories (I even published an obscure little paper about it here). And then this most recent election confirmed my fears once and for all, as the same man who utterly botched the pandemic response (seriously, how do you just ignore the pandemic handbook bequeathed to you by two previous administrations?!) was given another chance to ruin it all again, as though that disaster had never happened.

Spencer W. Kimball once said that the word remember is the most important word in the English language (or presumably any language), and given how quickly we all forgot about a pandemic that killed millions globally, disabled tens of millions with “long COVID,” infected hundreds of millions, and impacted billions, I have had repeated and recent cause to reflect upon the wisdom of his words. Never again can we act shocked when we read about how quickly the Nephites forgot and backslid into iniquity in the space of only a few years, when we have watched it happen just within the last few years before our very eyes.

This is why we must partake of the Sacrament each week, that we may “always remember him,” because we forget–just constantly–just in general! So few people actually try to remember anything. But Andrew Bird at least has remembered the pandemic, one of the few to do so (alongside Ben Folds and Damon & Naomi—and how telling that it has been solely been Indie musicians on the margins that have even tried to remember)—and moreover memorialized it in a Christmas song, so that with the passing of each year we might always remember—