Nochebuena with Patricia Vonne

One sidebar in the last few years of 12 Songs has been the role
of COVID in the creation of Christmas music. Some artists
recorded Christmas albums to remind themselves that they were
musicians during the pandemic shutdown of 2020. Some were able to
get musicians who would otherwise be unavailable because COVID
forced them off the road, and others had specific circumstances
related to COVID that led to their Christmas albums. 
San Antonio-based roots rocker Patricia Vonne falls into the
latter category. In this week’s episode, she tells the story of
what prompted her to record My Favorite Holiday, and how she
got an army of musical friends including Rubén Blades, Alex Ruiz,
David Grissom, Rosie Flores, Stephen Ferrone, Carmine Rojas and
more to participate.   I love Vonne’s energy and positivity in
this conversation. She never stops selling, but that makes sense.
Her story is a working artist’s story, and she lives from gig to
gig and album to album. That’s a perspective that’s easy to
overlook in the show biz world that many Christmas albums live
in.    This week’s episode also takes a quick look at the
last Christmas-related hit of 2021, “Christmas Tree” by V of K-pop
stars BTS. I argue that it’s not really a Christmas song and pay
more attention to an earlier, truer Christmas song from BTS,
“Christmas Day” by Jimin and Jungkook.    If you haven't
already done so, please do what you have to do to get Twelve Songs
in your podcast feed. You can find us at Apple
Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Pandora,
and Spotify.  During our post-Christmas break, we went
live on the IHeartRadio platform and Amazon's podcast platform.
Now, you can ask Alexa and Siri to play the Twelve Songs of
Christmas podcast and let them pop it up on your voice-controlled
personal assistant.