It was round about this time last year that I discovered the joys of Dylan's Christmas album, the wonderfully accurately titled Christmas in the Heart. I'd heard about the release of the album, back in 2009, and wondered about getting hold of it then, but the generally poor reviews put me off. Silly me! I played it twice last year, the first time on the way down to Honey Street in Devon, and then in Kate and Rob's old house itself, in the kitchen, before the rest of the household awoke. As I reported then, it seemed to me the perfect Christmas album, strangely bringing back for me a visceral sense of Christmas Past and its particular joys.
I gave it another spin today and was swept away. I never thought I would ache with such nostalgia for the season, but the memories came flooding back from the first strains of Here Comes Santa Claus. And, funnily enough, nostalgia for our Devon sojourn was in the mix somewhere.
This is all deeply strange. Although I know most of the songs on the album, the carols most obviously, Dylan's Christmas is an entirely American one, it seems to me, situated some time in the late 1940s. I can't quite work out how this becomes a Manchester Christmas of the 1960s, though I suppose America is what we got on the telly. (For some reason I keep thinking of Andy Williams.) Indeed, the songs that now are regarded as Christmas songs in the UK, generally having their origins in the 1970s, uniformly depress me.
One aspect of the magic is Dylan's voice. It's almost completely raddled and works in complete contrast to the breezily cute, very white harmonies of the backing singers, the painfully lovely strings, (not credited for some reason) and the lush yet spare precision of the band. But he really means what he's singing in an entirely, goofily manner. You sort of want to laugh, and frequently smile, but the tenderness sucks you in. How sad it must be not to enjoy this.
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