Wrap Me Up by Jimmy Fallon and Meghan Trainor—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2023-’24

 

                                                        Wrap Me Up by Jimmy Fallon and Meghan Trainor.

It is with no little regret that today’s Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival entry comes from the relentlessly self-promoting and hyperkinetic talk show host Jimmie Fallon and pop diva Meghan Trainor.  Fallon spent the last week shamelessly hyping their holiday collaboration on the Tonight Show, on his many other NBC projects, and wherever else he can get noticed.  His self-proclaimed goal has been to knock Maria Carrey and the ubiquitous All I Want For Christmas is You for the top-spot on the seasonal charts.  Last I heard the new release was #2 with a bullet.

Any alternative to Carey’s annual ear worm is welcome.  

 Can Write me Up finally dislodge Marriah Carey's death grip on the annual holiday music charts?

Wrap Me Up is a spritely pop holiday romantic tune in the lane of such double entendres asladen and suggestive songs as Santa Baby and Baby It’s Cold Outside only not so suggestive.  It is pleasant and generic enough to fit into any holiday radio playlist but is ultimately forgettable.  It will probably not go on to be a seasonal perennial reaping jaw dropping residual payments every year.

The way Fallon told the story, he casually mentioned the idea of a Christmas collaboration  to Trainor who has frequently appeared on his shows.  He even suggested the title Wrap Me for Christmas.  He probably was expecting, at best, a rap to use on  the show.    Trainor was non-committal but after a few days sent him a demo.   By changing the idea to Wrap Me Up she not only  scraped the urban edge, she channeled the song to pop.  The pair collaborated at a distance, sharing music files until a final version was achieved with contributions from Gian Stone and Sean Douglas.  Producers assembled the recording without all musicians in the studio at the same time. 

Fallon and Trainor even went of rival Jimmy Kimmel's ABC competitor to plug their song.

Trainor rose to prominence after signing with Epic Records in 2014 and releasing her debut single All About That Bass, which reached # 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and sold 11 million copies worldwide. She has released five studio albums with the label and has received various accolades, including the 2016 Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

 

The Prayer from One World: Together At Home—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

The Prayer performed by Celine Dion,Andrea Bocelli, Lady Gaga, classical pianist Lang Lang, and John Legend on The Prayer from One World: Together At Home.

Saturday night many of us watched the two-hour special One World: Together At Home, a benefit for Trump’s bête noir the World Health Organization (WHO) organized by Lady Gaga and Global Citizen.  If we were watching TV, on a computer, or other gizmo we hardly had a choice—it was aired on the heritage broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC; several cable channels, social media platforms like Facebook, and on YouTube.  Fox New was conspicuous by its absence.  Go figure.

The show came on the heels of other celebrity heavy programs to benefit various Coronavirus causes like Country Music Association (CMA) show in lieu of their cancelled awards ceremony and several streaming projects put together by music stars from every genre.  It went just about as you would suspect only more so.

Late night hosts Stephen Colbert and the two Jimmies, Fallon and Kimmel.

Co-Hosted by the three network late night stars Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel, the program had several highlights.  Organizer Lady Gaga, sans glam costume and in restrained make up, her hair pulled back under headphones in a severe bun with dark roots encroaching deeply into her bleached blonde hair eschewed her own power pop to give a powerful and emotional versions of Charlie Chaplin’s bittersweet ballad Smile.  Other musical highlights included the Rolling Stones performing You Can’t Always Get What You Want in a Zoom style slit screen from their homes with Charlie Watts caught without his drum kit and having to mime his part to a recorded track; Jennifer Lopez channeling Barbra Streisand on People; Sir Elton John, veteran of so many celebrity benefit collaborations; Stevie Wonder with Bill Withers Lean on Me; and Taylor Swift confounding her detractors with an emotional version of Soon You’ll Get Better originally written for her cancer stricken mother.

Lady Gaga singing Charlie Chaplain's Smile.

Several global leaders made un-musical appetences including WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom and United Nations Secretary General Secretary António Guterres.  But the joint appearance of former First Ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama must have driven the TV and ratings obsessed Cheeto-in-charge completely around the bend with jealousy and rage.

The climax of the show was a powerful rendition of The Prayer performed from the homes of Celine Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Lady Gaga, classical pianist Lang Lang, and John Legend.  The song was written by David Foster, Carole Bayer Sager, Alberto Testa, and Tony Renis for the 1998 animated feature The Quest for Camelot.  It was recorded by Dion in English and Bocelli in Italian and then as a duet by both singers. The song won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1999 and a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals in 2000.

Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival—New Year’s Day

For Americans New Year’s Day is a kind of low key and lethargic holiday.  Many New Year’s Eve revelers nurse hangovers.  For other’s it is a spend the day in pajamas and robe affair to veg out in front of the tube and watch the Rose Parade and endless college bowl games.   It is the biggest day of the year for ordering pizza delivery.   

For many Americans New Year's day means drininking coffee, nursing a hangover and watching the Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadina

There have not been many songs for January 1.  For years we were stuck with U2’s first big hit, New Year’s Day released in 1987 and dedicated to the Polish Solidarity movement.  It set the tone for decades of self-important and self-righteous songs with supposedly meaningful and progressive themes with Bono doing his patented vocal pyrotechnics.  A lot of folks love that stuff, but it has come to irritate the hell out of me.

Then there are all of the colleg Bowl games and time to order pizza.

In 2017 Taylor Swift offered us an alternative.  I know that there are folks who follow this who have nothing but scorn for the country/pop diva and her endlessly autobiographical songs of failed relationships.  But I have always thought that if you take her for what she is and don’t try to compare her female stars of country music’s golden age she does what she does very well.

New Year’s Day is off Swift’s sixth studio album, Reputation (2017). Swift co-wrote and co-produced the track with Jack Antonoff.  She debuted the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and was only a mid-level country music hit.  But the critical reception was very positive. 

One reviewer wrote:

New Year’s Day isn't the best song on Reputation, but it’s one of the best, and like the rest of the good ones it excels because the petulant sense of betrayal that fuels the album elsewhere has receded. It turns out, that, once she puts herself in position to express emotions more common and profound than the sense of being an ultrafamous pop musician who got exposed by other ultrafamous celebrities as cold-blooded and duplicitous, that she’s still an artistic force to be reckoned with.