The Lorem Ipsum Christmas EP, Part 1

Album links:  Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon Music

In May of this year (2025) I decided I wanted to do a Christmas EP.  I wanted to do a few traditional-ish songs and then cap it off with an original and I also wanted to rope a couple of friends in to collaborate.

For the traditionals I settled on "Here Comes Santa Claus," "O Holy Night," and "The 12 Days of Christmas" with the twist that the latter was going to be about dinosaurs and rechristened "The 12 Tyrannosaurs of Christmas."  I decided that the Christmas Truce of 1914 would be the topic for the original, an idea that had been knocking around in my head for a while.

I had also toyed with the idea of doing "We Three Kings" and getting a couple of my male vocalist friends to help but I decided the logistics of coordinating would be difficult and in any case I don't love that song anyway.  I would have been picking it to justify the trio, not writing a trio around a song I really wanted to do.

But with a lighthearted song ("Here Comes Santa Clause"), a hymn ("O Holy Night"), a bittersweet World War I song ("Maybe Next Year"), and a completely batshit song ("The 12 Tyrannosaurs of Christmas") what the heck was I going to call this?  Compositionally I had planned for them to all have very different feels, too, so a unifying title was ... not revealing itself.  So as a joke to myself, my working title was Lorem Ipsum Christmas. 

Lorem Ipsum is what designers and publishers sometimes use as placeholder text.  It's a bastardized version of a writing of Cicero and the words "Lorem ipsum" are a corruption of "dolorem ipsum"which means "pain itself," which I also thought was funny as I was daunted by this undertaking and was worried it going to be painful.

But then the more I thought about it the more I realized it was kind of a perfect title.  So "Lorem Ipsum Christmas" it is.

Compositionally, the four songs on Lorem Ipsum fall into two categories: Chord first and Melody First.

My original song "Maybe Next Year (Christmas 1914)' was written in my usual chord first style, where I figure out some chord progressions I like, then find a melody, then work out the lyrics and arrangement.  (The "arrangement" being what all the support instruments are doing and when.)

"Here Comes Santa Claus," "O Holy Night" and "The 12 Tyrannosaurs of Christmas" were done melody first, where I input the melody into my notation software and then built the arrangement from the ground up around the melody.

This piece will focus on "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "O Holy Night."

For a deep dive into "Maybe Next Year (Christmas 1914)" click here

For a look at "The 12 Tyrannosaurs of Christmas" click here.

Here Comes Santa Claus

Selection and Conception

I had played this song with Beemo on WMFE's Intersection with Matthew Peddie many years ago and I quite like it.   I wanted something light and fun and low stakes since I already knew I was doing "O Holy Night" and a World War I song.

Inspired by my summer of recording late 19th Century American music for the Lazarus Music Project, I wanted to take a stab at making an arrangement that harkened back to that style.  A lot of those songs that I recorded had a nylon string guitar playing a sort of stride piano figure, alternating between bass notes plucked with the thumb and then chords higher up with the other fingers.

I wanted this to be a vocal duet with Megan Katarina, a great singer and extremely talented songwriter that I met when she played at a bar near my house.  I'd been wanting to work with her for a while and this seemed like a fun opportunity.  She is a really subtle and clever lyricist with a lot of depth and wit and that all comes through in her vocal performances.   I thought that would be perfect for a song like this. (Check out her songs "It's Not You It's Me," "Weak Moment," "I'm Getting Drunk," and "He's Seen Me Naked" for a look into what I'm talking about.)

With this vocal duet in mind I decided that the mandolin and mandocello were going to be co-equals on this track, reflecting the soprano / baritone duet in the vocals.

Arrangement

I put this in a fast 2/2, similar to The Toastmaster and The Gallery Gods March.  I took a stab at putting the melody in a key I could sing it in and sent it to Megan to see if she could do it up an octave from there.  I'm used to writing for Dan to sing, and his voice is little higher than mine, but i have no idea how to write for a female range.  Megan gave me the thumbs up on the key and i did the rest of the arrangement.

I decided to keep the song short, with a brief intro then 2 verse / choruses, a solo over the same verse / chorus chords, then a final verse / chorus.   The whole thing clocks in at under 2 minutes.

Generally the guitar holds down the chords in the stride figure, with some walk downs in the spaces after the vocal lines are done.   The mandolin and mandocello dance around it staying simple while the vocals are going then play off each other with little licks in the interstitial spaces.  (Inspired by Tonner's Second Rule of Thumb: don't play complicated stuff while the vocals are going.)

I wrote the mandolin and mandocello parts to complement each other, usually working in a more contrapuntal style but sometimes harmonizing over quick little bursts.  The solo is a dual solo between the two, with the mandolin kicking it off by quoting the "dashing through the snow" opening of jingle bells before jumping into the counterpoint.

I'm singing the lead on the first verse and chorus, with Megan doubling me up an octave at the first chorus.   Once she's in, through, I thought it was wise to yield the lead vocals to her for the rest.  There's already an escalation when she comes in because she's up an octave from me and she's also a much better singer than I am so it didn't make sense to me to escalate the song by having her take it and then grind it to a halt by having the crappier singer take back over.  I just harmonized and tried to stay out of the way.   I come in harmonizing in chorus 2 and then harmonize with her over the entire 3rd verse and chorus.

I simplified the instrumental arrangement in the third verse / chorus because both Megan and I are singing and I didn't want to over-arrange it.

Performance

This one wasn't too hard, with the exception of the some of the guitar chords at the beginning.  I wrote them in my notation software while focusing on the voice leading so there's some pretty odd fingerings that aren't in my usual lexicon / muscle memory.   The mandolin and mandocello parts, particularly the solo, were fast but not all that difficult.  And the song is short so it was easy to focus.

Megan did not disappoint.  She was perfect and, in addition to hitting all the notes, she gave the performance a lot of character.  I particularly like on her first chorus how you can almost hear her smile on "oh what a wonderful sight."  Her parts came out exactly how I was hoping they would and she did it without much prep from me.  Her instincts were all dead on.  (It was also nice chatting with her and getting to know her a little better.)

The hard part for me on this song was the harmonies, as I did it in the same session that she recorded her vocals, so I obviously didn't have a chance to really practice with her track.  I had to wait until her part was done to make sure I knew what she was singing and then work it out on the fly right after she finished.  I was also a little congested, but the parts were were not in a challenging part of my range; the difficulty was just in figuring the notes out, then matching Megan's diction.  Mike and Dakotah were really helpful here and I hope I managed it without detracting from Megan's really wonderful performance.

O Holy Night

Selection and Conception

This is hands down favorite Christmas song, final answer, no contest.  I love the melody and I find the lyrics really powerful and affecting.  I absolutely did not want to attempt to sing this one though.  I am a decent singer in that I have good pitch and my timbre, when I stay in my lane, is mostly fine.  But I am not a trained singer and my range and breath control is limited so the idea of giving an uninspired performance on a song that is both hard to sing and also one of my favorite songs ever was not appealing.  So I needed a collaborator.

The first and only name on my list for this was my friend Jordan Mohr.  I've worked with her before and I've seen her sing multiple times.  She has a big, powerful voice and seeing as she sings for her church I though the chances were very good that she already knew this one.  She's also a very nice person who is organized and easy to work with.

I worked up the song in a couple of keys and met with her to figure out which one was best for her.  (This song starts low and then also gets really high; it's the "Star Spangled Banner" of Christmas songs.)   We settled on G, which coincidentally and not relevantly, is the only key I can even sort of sing it in.

I wanted to keep this one simple, so as not to distract from the lovely melody and lyrics.  I wanted Jordan's voice to be the feature here and mostly not draw too much attention to the other instruments.  Inspired by some of the old string quartets I'd recorded for LMP I tried to go for an almost Baroque or maybe Renaissance style string arrangement.

Arrangement

"O Holy Night" is in triple meter and I did the arrangement in 6/8.  (I've also seen it in 12/8 which, in retrospect, might have been easier.)  I decided I want to use the mandola as the main instrument.  Though I said this was conceived as a string quartet (two mandolins, mandola, mandocello) it's actually sextet with bass and guitar playing support roles.  The bass is just givings some stability to the low end while the guitar is only doing single long slow strums starting on "a thrill of hope."  (Sonically, the guitar is meant to represent a thrill running through the body.)

There's actually kind of a lot of motion throughout in all the instruments (though not all at the same time) between the triplet arpeggios and the general walking contour of the mandocello and mandolin parts.  But I think, or at least I hope, it doesn't distract from Jordan's performance.

I cut the traditional second verse entirely and truncated the third verse, starting with the lines

Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother

And in his name all oppression will cease

This is my favorite and I think the most powerful part of the song so I wanted to emphasize it by leading off verse 2 with it.

(Also, "O Holy Night" is a French song and the English translation was done by John Sullivan Dwight, a man from Boston who wrote the English lyrics in 1855.  From a very cursory look at the French lyrics, the sense of this verse is a little different, without the active breaking chains and "in his name all oppression will cease."   I can't help but wonder if a man trained as a Unitarian minister in Boston only a few years before the Civil War maybe was an abolitionist and emphasized those aspects of the song.)

Performance

Since all told I was trying to keep the arrangement not too ambitious and leave space for the vocals, this wasn't too hard to track, though the mandola part in the second verse was actually quite hard to play.  This is an occupational hazard of writing in Sibelius based on the melodic leading rather than doing it with an instrument in my hand.   After doing the Lazarus Music Project for 4 years or so I've gotten pretty good at estimating the playability of a part by looking at it, and in my defense, after I looked at what I had written I knew it was going to be trouble.

It still wasn't too bad though as I drilled the hell out of it before I went into the studio.

Jordan did a stellar job.  She comped the parts, doing about 5 takes and then we sorted through the best phrases.  The timing of my version was a little idiosyncratic and slightly different than what she was used to singing but she adjusted really well.  I'm really glad she could help me with this one.

Album Artwork

I wanted something relatively simple for the album art; like simple enough that I could do it myself.  Given how much I like to use Keynote to make animated videos I thought it might be cute to use it for this.  (Keynote is the Mac equivalent of PowerPoint. See Beemo's Just Wait, Barricades, and Laurel Wreath vids for some of the goofy animations I've done with it.)

I like how my Don't Fade Away album art came out, so I used a similar template, with a top and bottom horizontal border over an image.

Coming up with a that image was going to be a challenge, given the random nature of the track list, so I decided to do one small, simple drawing for each song.   I did pencil sketches of something that represented each track and then took a photo of them, imported the photo into Keynote, and then traced the lines with the pen tool.

There's a Santa Claus for "Here Comes Santa Claus," a Tyrannosaurus rex head for "The 12 Tyrannosaurs," a nativity manger for "O Holy Night," and poppies for "Maybe Next Year."   (Poppies are a symbol of World War I, inspired by John McCrae's war poem "In Flanders Field.")

I wanted Christmas colors so I made the top and bottom borders has green and I decided to have each song image have an accent of red.  It's low rent, but I think it's got a certain silly charm.

Conclusion

So that's a bit about the album in general and some detail about "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "O Holy Night."  As I said above, I have separate deep dives into the creation of "The 12 Tyrannosaurs of Christmas" and "Maybe Next Year (1914)," here and here,  respectively.

Lorem Ipsum Christmas is available on all digital platforms, so check it out.

Album links:  Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon Music

Hope you enjoy the EP.  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

-m