This week we discuss an anonymous request and a beautiful baffling miracle which both feature NPR personalities performing songs about being dominated by robots at Christmastime. “Chiron Beta Prime” by Jonathan Coulton and “Toymageddon” by Yo La Tengo, Ira Glass, and Eugene Mirman spin two captivating Christmas tales/post-apocalyptic visions. Alternate episode title: Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me With Robots
It’s another week of Hanukkah tunes on HARK! As Yom Kippur approaches, we’re listening to some more somber Hanukkah music – “Light One Candle” by Peter, Paul and Mary and “Feast of Lights” by They Might Be Giants – two songs which couldn’t be more different, but both offer complexity in a simple package.
Happy Rosh Hashanah! In honor of the new year, this week we listened to two Hanukkah songs released in the past year. The result was some smooth and chilled-out holiday delights: “8 Days (of Hanukkah)” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and “Outside of December” by The Leeves and Matisyahu. Shanah tovah!
Hey, remember the 90s? If you’re roughly our age and were required to line dance in gym class or ever attended a wedding, you’re about to. We’re covering two Christmas versions of dance craze songs: “Macarena Christmas” by Los del Rio and “XMas Slide” by Xpress Band. Thank you to Sarah for the request!
This week, we cover two songs in a language new to the list – but pulled from albums we’ve visited many times before. “O Tannenbaum” and “Stille Nacht” mark our first songs in German, just in time for Oktoberfest. Hear Nat King Cole, a chorus of Muppets, and one of HARK’s co-hosts attempt to pronounce and sing this beautiful language. (No. sarcasm. intended.)
There’s a door at the back of your mind. Do you open it? A strange little boy approaches you to tell you he sleeps in cars because he’s bad. How quickly do you phone for help? These and other questions asked and, more or less, answered in this spoken word episode of HARK, featuring “Faith In Santa” performed by Hermann Lammers Meyer and “The Train” by Celestial Navigations. In case you can’t tell, this one was kind of a trip.
We missed National Dog Day, but every week is a good week to celebrate our furry friends. Right? Come with us on this. We listened to two songs about pets, “Christmas Is Going to the Dogs” by Eels and “It’s Hard to Be a Cat On Christmas” by Cats Across America, and it, you know, could have gone worse. It didn’t go great.
With one week left until September, it’s back to school season! Hear us stroll down memory lane with Christmas songs by bands that bring us back to our own school days, “Christmas at the Zoo” by The Flaming Lips and “It’s Christmas Time” by Yo La Tengo.
Friend of the show Andy has served us with another request – this time for what could be the worst of all versions of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”: a Nativity/Good Friday centric cover by The Osmonds, recorded in the Year of our Lord 2015. To cleanse our palates, we then listened to Rufus Wainwright’s “Spotlight on Christmas”. Hallelujah.
This week on HARK we return to a musical genre we haven’t heard in a while – hip-hop – and do we even have to tell you at this point that the results were mixed? RJ adores the lollygagging “Landy In my Eggnog” by Bad Lucc enough for the both of us, while our opinions are more united on the brief but baffling “Hanukkah (My Favorite Time of the Year)” by Too $hort,