You don’t really expect Cheap Trick to drop a Christmas album. You expect them to sneer at Christmas albums from a hotel bar booth with a Jack and Coke. But somehow Christmas Christmas exists, and it doesn’t suck. In fact, it rocks—hard. And that surprises even the band.
“We thought, ‘Well, we’ve never done one,’” says bassist Tom Petersson, who admits the idea first got floated in the spring—just early enough to not forget it until December. “Usually you think about it during Christmas when it’s too late.”
Cue Julian Raymond, their producer and fifth Beatle-type figure, who “put some songs together,” including three or four new ones the band wrote themselves. Standards? Only one, technically. “The only real standard is ‘Silent Night,’” Tom says, before quickly clarifying, “We did a real dark version of that. Not like ‘Jingle Bells.’ Oh god, you can’t take it anymore.”
Instead of sleigh bells and snowflakes, they went with T. Rex, Slade, Roy Wood, and the Kinks. Except their Kinks cover doesn’t really sound like the Kinks. “We cut it down, slowed it down—it turned into sounding like The Who doing The Kinks,” Tom laughs. “Which is awesome.”
For a band that’s often had to fight producers to keep things loud, this one got to stay loud. “People always wanted to straighten us out. Make us sound more commercial. Like, ‘That’s too scary.’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah. That’s the point.’” But Julian, Petersson says, “encourages us to be what we naturally are. Which turns out is really heavy.”
Even the deep cuts on Christmas Christmas have an edge. They covered Harry Nilsson’s “Remember (Christmas)”—“one of my favorite songs of all time,” says Tom—though it might not actually be about Christmas. “I don’t think it has anything to do with Christmas. But hey, it’s a great song.”
As for the originals, they’re aiming high—but not cynical about it. “Sure, you think about writing that one big Christmas hit. Slade’s lead singer said he never had to write another song again,” Petersson notes. “But we didn’t try to game the system. We just did what we liked.”
Then again, they do have another Christmas song already—2012’s “I Want You for Christmas,” a parody of their own “I Want You to Want Me.” Was there any talk about putting it on the record? “I don’t think we thought it was that great,” Tom shrugs. “We didn’t put very much thought into it. That one was just like—okay, yeah, now that’s a Christmas song.”
But if Cheap Trick’s holiday release is an unexpected delight, Petersson’s other project is an even more meaningful surprise: Rock Your Speech, an initiative he and his wife Alison launched to help kids on the autism spectrum find their voices through music. Their son, now 10, didn’t speak until age five. But he always loved music—and could nail the timing of a lyric even if he didn’t say anything else. So Petersson started writing simple rock songs with clear, usable phrases.
“We didn’t want to make kid music,” he says. “We wanted something you could play for anyone, any age, and not be embarrassed.” No “Wheels on the Bus.” More Beatles. “You know, ‘Help! I need somebody!’ That kind of simple phrasing.”
They’re creating songs, videos, and even songbooks that music therapists can use live with guitars. And yeah, the music’s actually good. “Therapists keep telling us: ‘We know music works. But the music we have to work with is terrible.’” So they fixed that.
And now they’re throwing a benefit concert: Cheap Trick will headline the Rock Your Speech benefit for the Autism Society of America on December 2nd at the Orpheum Theatre in LA. It’s a stacked lineup—Dandy Warhols, Red Kross, Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano, and a garage-punk supergroup called the Empty Hearts (members of Blondie, The Cars, and The Romantics), among others. “Billy Bob Thornton’s gonna be there too,” Petersson adds. “We’ll just see what happens.”
In the meantime, Christmas Christmas will keep shaking the snow off your holiday playlist—and it’ll likely be their only entry in the genre. “We won’t do another Christmas album for 40 years,” Tom says. “So this one’ll have to last.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Merry Christmas Darlings" below!
