Silver Bells

Silver Bells

All hazy with tryptophan from Thanksgiving dinner, I got the notion to make a holiday EP, so I spent some of my break in my home office/mini-studio tinkering in GarageBand. As building entire tracks takes a long time, I’m now thinking that a whole EP before Christmas might be a little ambitious, but maybe I can do it for next year. I did manage to complete something that resembles a Christmas song, though.

“Silver Bells” was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, and was unique in 1950 as it depicted Christmas in an urban environment^[1]. Maybe this is something I should have taken into consideration in my production of the song, but I overlooked it at the time. The song’s structure is pretty simple: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus. The hook is at the beginning of the chorus and is repeated in an echo, which helps to get it stuck in your head. And the happy-go-lucky—dare I say jolly?—canter of the verse seems perfectly suited to the Christmas theme.

I wanted to give the song a little bit more of a honky-tonk feel, so I added some flangey guitar over the traditional melody played by the piano, and a record static track for a little throwback feel. I also added the requisite sleigh bells and actually programmed the drums through my midi keyboard. This song could definitely use some more work, but I feel it’s pretty successful as a home production study.