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Calexico has released a cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Christmas classic, “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”. The Tuscon, Arizona-based indie rock band featured the song on their latest vacation album, Seasonal change.
“I love this song and love the universality of the lyrics and the sea of call and response of vocals,” singer and guitarist Joey Burns said in a press release. “I decided to start as quietly as possible and find out how well we could build this song.”
The group gave a slight southwest flair to the original song, which was released with an animated lyric video. The video shows pieces of paper drifting across the screen with cartoons of the group performing the song with scenes from the desert. In their version, they pull the chorus, singing the line “The war is over if you want it”, several times more than the original.
“We decided not to stop like the original and see what would happen if we kept the trance and mantra going. It’s something that we would do a lot on stage and we felt really good to try it out at home in our makeshift studios around the world, ”Burns said.
In November, Joe Wong and Mary Timony released a cover of Lennon and Ono “Every man has a woman who loves him” to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their album Double fantasy. In October, Sean Ono Lennon, their son, performed his father’s 1970 song “Isolation” on Stephen Colbert’s The late show in honor of what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday.
A new take on rock legend David Bowie is due out next month and feature a cover of ‘Mother’ by Lennon. Chris Cornell’s latest studio album, No One Sings Like You Anymore, was released on December 11 and includes a cover of “Watching The Wheels” by Lennon.
Calexico was supposed to play at the Hollywood Bowl in June for the year KCRW World Festival, but the show was canceled due to the pandemic. In early 2020, they co-titled a tour with Iron & Wine. The two groups released a collaborative album, Years to burn, last year, and they sat with mxdwn to discuss the album writing process
Many artists have released Christmas music recently, like Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, who shared a new single this week called “Christmas Song of the Depressed Unicorn,” which talks about the sadness many experience when celebrating the holidays alone this year. Sofi Tukker electronic duo released their version of “Carol of the Bells”, called “Caröl Von Holz” in collaboration with DJ Holzbläser. JD Cronise, frontman of The Sword, shared a cover of “Father Christmas” from The Sonic, which is available on Bandcamp as a free download.
Featured Image: Sharon Alagna
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