The Lorem Ipsum Christmas EP, Part 2 - "Maybe Next Year (Christmas 1914)"

This piece is a look at the conception and writing of my original song "Maybe Next Year (Christmas 1914)," written for my Lorem Ipsum Christmas EP, which released on November 29, 2025.  So if you're interested in how the sausage is made, this is for you.

Album links:  Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon Music

For a discussion of my Christmas EP in general, click here and for a deep dive into the writing / arranging of "The 12 Tyrannosaurs of Christmas" click here.

Conception

I first learned about the Christmas Truce in 2019 when Opera Orlando performed "All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914."  To quote the playbill:

In the week leading up to December 25, French, German, and British soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. In some areas, men from both sides ventured into “No Man’s Land” on Christmas Eve and Christmas day to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, with several meetings ending in a round of carols. Men even played games of football with one another, creating one of the most memorable images of the truce.

The show itself, created by Cantus Vocal Ensemble and Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis in 2007, was a very powerful and affecting experience.  The production intersperses performers reciting first hand accounts of the war with the singing of patriotic and Christmas songs.  The culmination of the work, when the soldiers sing carols together in multiple languages against the backdrop of a brutal war was one of the most moving experiences I've had in the theater.

Opera Orlando performed All is Calm again in 2022 and it was equally powerful.  This year, in partnership with Orlando Family Stage, they are putting on a free show running Dec 12-14.  Click here for the ticket link.  Highly recommend.

(Also, on Feb 6 & 8 of 2026, Opera Orlando is putting on Silent Night, a Pulitzer Prize winning 2011 opera, also about the Christmas Truce.  I preemptively recommend this one, too.)

When I was thinking about doing a Christmas EP, I absolutely wanted to write an original for it, and the Truce was a topic I'd been thinking about writing a song about for a while.  I thought it could be a somber song ultimately about hope for a brighter tomorrow and the tag could be something like "I know it won't last, but maybe next year"

Writing

Lyrics in a song like this are a challenge because I have a lot of ground to cover.  Since it's an historical event, and one people may not be familiar with, I need to very quickly establish the setting and as this song is a story, I also have a plot to convey.   I also cheated a little and put "(Christmas 1914)" in the song title.

Especially for a narrative song like this, I like to write a rough outline of what each verse and chorus is going to say.  For this song, it was:

Verse 1:  Setting: WWI, winter, quiet, soldiers want to go home.

Chorus 1: Lone voice rises, starting the signing.  Guns calm, smiles bright

Verse 2:  They exchange gifts, play soccer, sing songs, though they don't understand the others' language

Chorus 2:  Voices rise.  Alter from first chorus.  Guns calm, hope bright.

Chorus 3:  Repeat of chorus two, with choral vocals, like everyone is singing.

It seemed prudent to use verse 1 to set up the event then have the first chorus be the triggering action, i.e. the first voice singing.  Verse 2 would be details of the soldiers interacting and Chorus 2 would be everyone singing, and an escalation from verse 1.  For emphasis, I wanted to have a chorus 3 with gang vocals to evoke the soldiers singing together.

I like to have the chords and the melody before I start really hammering out the lyrics, so I don't get stuck with a line I like but can't make fit, or mangle an existing line to smash into a melody it wasn't designed for.  Having an outline really helps me focus the music too, so I can tailor the chords and melodies to support the ideas that I've come up.

So, with all that in mind...

The Music

I started with the chorus on this one.  I knew the final tag would be "I know it won't last, but maybe next year" but I didn't really have any melodic or chord ideas when I started.  Given how "Silent Night" has become sort of the shorthand for the Christmas Truce, I thought using it as a starting point would be a nice homage.  ("Silent Night" is also my second favorite Christmas song, after "O Holy Night.")  So, like "Silent Night," "Maybe Next Year" is also in a triple meter, 6/8 in this case.

"Silent Night"  is structured like this, using the chord numbering system:

I I V  V7 I "Silent Night, holy night..."

IV I IV I "Round yon Virgin..."

V V7 I vi V I "Sleep in heavenly peace...."

In the key of G that would be this:

G G D  D7 G "Silent Night, holy night..."

C G C G "Round yon Virgin..."

D D7 G Em D G "Sleep in heavenly peace...."

I wanted to use the chord harmony to reflect the mood and ideas of the song, and given the World War I subject matter I made some changes.  For starters I adjusted the opening lines' I chords to the relative minors, which is mostly the same notes but centered around a different tone which gives a more somber cast in this context.

So this:

G G D  D7 G

Turned into:

Em G D  D7 Em

I repeated this line twice, then took the "Round yon Virgin" progression and turned that IV chord (C in this case) into its relative minor, again giving it a more mournful feel than "Silent Night" has.   

So this:

C G C G

Turned into:

Am G Am G

The line here ended up as "The guns stand calm, smiles shine bright" an homage to the "All is calm, all is bright' line in "Silent Night."   Given that chord harmony I wanted to go up for the "They know it won't last" and I thought the iii chord, Bm, had a poignant almost plaintive quality, so the tag line became:

          Bm         Em        Am        D   D7   G

And they know it won't last, but maybe.... Maybe next year

With those chords in mind I wrote the chorus melody.  I landed on the first chorus line being "a lone voice rose" and wrote the chorus melody to feature a lot of ascending patterns in the first section to reflect voices rising out of silence.  For the second section, from "The guns stand calm" I had the melody start to trend downward as it leads to the sad realization that "they know it won't last."

The verse chords are simpler than the chorus being Em Am D D7 G in verse 1.   I ended up switching the vi chord to it's relative major for the first half of verse 2, which ended up G Am D D7 G.   As I was thinking about the "plot" I decided this part of the song was going to be the most hopeful and I wanted the brighter G major chord rather than the more morose Em.

I wanted the opening lyric of the song to be "The snow falls down" as it is a simple image that helps establish the winter setting and is understated enough to establish that it's a quiet moment.  We don't start with guns or echoes of sound, but with snow silently falling. With this in mind I wrote the verse melody to be a generally descending one, falling like the snow, in opposition to the generally rising melody of the chorus.

So now I had chords and vocal melodies for the choruses and the verses.  I decided I wasn't going to really have a solo, so the interlude between Chorus 1 and Verse 2 is just a single restatement of the Verse 2 chords, signaling the transition to the hopeful section.  I wanted to double the last chorus for emphasis, so there would be another short interlude between Choruses 2 and 3.

Lyrics

After getting all the sections worked out, I started on the lyrics,  I, somewhat typically, expanded my outline, writing out more detail in prose (ish):

Verse 1:

Setting.  The snow falls, the guns are silent, gas dissipates, yesterday’s corpses are littered on the ground.  The men are freezing.  Right when they are thinking of home...

Chorus 1:   

In the dark a voice rose up in song above the barbed wire, no man's land filled with tired voices.  From all around it was joined by tired men. The guns stood calm, the smiles shone bright. I know it won't last but maybe, maybe next year.

Verse 2

Instead of giving each other bombs they exchange gifts.  They all know the songs even if they don't know the languages the others are singing in.  They see each other as people rather than a faceless enemy.  It'll be different in the morning, but for now, it's ok.

Fitting these ideas and shaving things off or adding things to fit the melody, I was left with this:

Verse 1

The snow falls down, the guns silent now

Under the barbed wire, the dead frozen on the ground

The night has come, with its bone chilling cold

They think of home, can they get back somehow?

Chorus 1:

A lone voice rose, then was joined from all around

And they fill no man's land with the songs of weary men

The guns stand calm, smiles shine bright

And they know it won't last, but maybe, maybe next year

Verse 2:

They trade gifts instead of bombs, they laugh and embrace

The words are unclear, but their songs are the same

They see each others eyes, their rage and terror sleep

Until the dawn wakens them to kill again

Chorus 2:

The voices rise and weave a wondrous sound

And they fill no man's land with the songs of joyous men

The guns stand calm, hope shines bright

And they know it won't last but maybe, maybe next year

Chorus 3:

The voices rise and weave a wondrous sound

And they fill no man's land with the songs of joyous men

The guns stand calm, hope shines bright

And I know it won't last but maybe, maybe next year

As is my usual mode I wrote this in mostly blank verse (i.e. unrhymed) though there are moments, especially in the first verse, that have some approximate rhymes via the vowels.  I prefer blank verse or mostly blank verse because it allows a more natural poetic line; doing rhymed couplets can be really hard to sustain without giving a singsong rhythm which I definitely didn't want for this song.  It's fine for a fun drinking song, but for a song about a pause in the butchery of World War I, it's not at all the effect I wanted.

I decided to make the tag line third person for choruses 1 and 2: "they know it won't last" instead of "I know it won't last."  The narrative voice is in third person and is not a participant during the verses, and I thought it would make a nice contrast in chorus 3 to switch to "I" both because it's from the perspective of all the soldiers singing the gang vocals, and to universalize it.  The first choruses take place in 1914, and the "they" hope peace will last next year.  The last chorus is 2025, and "I" am still hoping the same thing.

I've found that slightly altering a chorus lyric the second time through can be a powerful tool, and the contrast from the first chorus really emphasizes whatever's different.  (See Pearl Jam's "Light Years" for a stellar example of this, no pun intended. [honestly not intended])   Hence the change from "lone voice" to "voices," "joined from all around" to "weave and wondrous sound," and "smiles" to "hope."

(I am aware that I shifted into past tense for line 1 of chorus 1; it was important that it was a "lone voice" but I couldn't make the proper grammar work while fitting the meter in present tense, so I sacrificed grammatical consistency for the greater good.  F*cking English language.)

In Verse 2, I intentionally kept the "wakens them" ambiguous; "them" could be the men or "them" could be the men's "rage and terror."  The dark ending of this verse also led me to switch from the more optimistic G major chord it started with and go back to verse 1's E minor halfway through.

Arrangement

I originally wrote this in A major / F# minor, but realized I was potentially going to have trouble singing it.  I really liked the voice leading on the arpeggiated guitar at the beginning though, meaning I couldn't just shift it down a step by switching from open A style chords to open G.  Then I remembered Mike had a baritone acoustic guitar at the studio, which is tuned a fifth down from a regular guitar.  I could capo the baritone at fret 3 and play it the way I wrote it in A / F#m and it would come out as G / E minor.  So if it sounds like it goes lower than a regular guitar can at the beginning, that's because it does.

I wanted to keep this arrangement relatively simple.  I wanted the mandolin, mandola, and mandocello to come in in the first chorus, to represent tenors, baritones, and bass singers joining in the singing.  So the mandolin comes in first with harmonics on "lone voice rose;" it's the tenor that starts it all.  Two measures later the mandocello comes in and the mandola two measures after that.  The arrangement is very simple, just dotted quarters, almost tentative, like the men are unsure of themselves as they join in.

The interlude quotes the "sleep in heavenly peace" melody from Silent Night.

In verse 2, the rhythms get a little more complicated and the instruments do some call and response type figures, reflecting the soldiers interacting with each other in song and in action, and Chorus 2 maintains this slightly elevated rhythmic complexity and interplay.

In the second interlude the mandolin takes a lead of sorts and the mandola quotes "O Holy Night" another nod to one of the songs that was sung during the truce.  (The French had an opera singer in the trenches who started this one off; in Opera Orlando's All is Calm, this moment gave me chills both times I saw it.)

I simplified the instrumental arrangement in Chorus 3 because I knew there were going to be gang vocal tracks and I didn't want to accidentally reduce the impact by distracting from it.  Halfway through the mandola does pick up on the idea that the mandolin played during Interlude 2, but the gang vocals have been well established by then and I wanted to keep the momentum going.

I wrote the gang vocals in three part harmony, with a bass, baritone, and faux-tenor,  (I can't sing tenor parts, so it's just higher than the other two, but not actually a tenor.)  I was going to do multiple takes of each part and layer them together so it sounded kind of like an impromptu choral performance.

When all of this was recorded I sent a version to Abigail Cline, a great songwriter and great friend, who offered to record a bowed upright bass part for it.  (I may or may not have sent it to her, hoping she might say that.)   I sent her a bounce of the track with the click (i.e. metronome) on and a couple of notes as to what I was looking for.  (She lives in Chicago)  About a week later she sent me 3 different takes with some different ideas and Mike and I sorted through them.  I think the bowed bass adds a lot and it fits the mood of the song far better than an electric bass would have.

Performance

Of the instruments. I probably spent the most time tracking the baritone guitar. The part isn't all that hard but it's really exposed at the beginning so I took my time and made sure it was rock solid.  The guitar is actually two separate baritone tracks, one for the arpeggios and one for the strumming that starts at the first chorus.  You do this so you can put a different EQ and/or volumes on one part without affecting the other.

The mandocello arpeggios that start on "they see each others' eyes" in verse 2 were physically the hardest things I had to play but I was really well practiced so it didn't take very long.  Oh, and the first interlude timing was actually kind of hard to get right as it's like this 3 against 2 rhythm which is really hard for me to internalize.  All told I maybe spent 2 hours tracking the four instrument parts (including setup time), with the baritone and mandocello taking the longest.

I did the lead vocal without any real problems.  I know my vocal limitations and accounted for that in the melody; I intentionally wrote one I could sing without difficulty.  (That's something I don't have to do when I'm writing for Beemo because Dan is a really, really good singer.)

The gang vocals were tricky mainly because I didn't know them all that well.  I recorded them on the same day as the lead vocal, so I didn't have a way to practice them beforehand because I didn't have a reference track to practice to.  I really should have just made my own scratch track, but even so, I procrastinated and only wrote them like 3 days before the session.  I sang each of the 3 parts 3 times at various distances from the mic in a triangle pattern.   So the first take would be right in front of the mic, take 2 would be two steps back and two steps to the left, and take 3 would be two steps back and two to the right.  We also panned them all differently so they sound like they are coming from all around.

I often had to stop in between gang vocal takes and listen to the midi version I made on my phone to make sure I had the starting note right.  It wasn't hard, exactly, but the nine tracks took about an hour for the 40ish seconds of chorus 3.

Conclusion

So that's the story of how "Maybe Next Year (Christmas 1914)" came to be.  Check It out, it's available on all digital platforms.

Links:   Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon | YouTube (Lyric Video)