ManMade Musical Advent Calendar: December 15th Edition

Look – there’s no shame in admitting it: we at ManMade love the holiday season. The lights, the smells, and, most importantly, the sounds. No, not the soft rock mall music or the umpteenth crooner cover filler track, but the good holiday songs. The ones that give you energy, make you feel festive, and happy that it’s December.

And so, in 2015, we’re sharing our ManMade Musical Advent Calendar, where we offer a new favorite holiday song every day, by bands you actually care about.      

Tuesday, December 15th: “Wonderful Christmastime ” by The Shins

Fact: Paul McCartney’s original is one of the most universally (or at least North American-ly) maligned seasonal tunes. There went one of popular music’s most amazing songwriters, a consummate performer, reduced to the utmost of flatness. The song is all chorus; no structure, no movement, no tension, notable only for its delay-y synth patch and those ever-present sleigh bells. 

Then, James Mercer and The Shins get ahold of it, and make it 10o times catchier, giving it melody and harmony and interest and modulation and all the stuff you actually expect from a pop song. And now it’s great and amazing and truly reminds you why the holiday season can be one of change. And you wish Paul would have just done it right in the first place, but happy someone figured it out eventually. And that’s certainly what Christmas feels like in most families…

Check out all the songs in the ManMade Musical Advent Calendar here!