Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

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Even the most topical songs got a little love in them.

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Anybody who knows us knows we do our share of topical songs. I don’t mean the kind of tunes you spread on your skin as a moisturizer – I mean songs about shit happening in the world. You know – the kind that get you pegged as a commie or a freak or something. Yeah, we do those.

I guess you could say that our latest single Against It is one such number. It’s a little ditty about the genocide in Gaza and how American politicians try to cover their asses over their support for the Israeli campaign in that unfortunate imprisoned enclave. Just the sort of song that might have put some noses out of joint five or ten years ago, though less so now. I’m guessing it’s gotten us added to somebody’s list, though likely we were already on it.

Welcome To It

Of course, Against It is not our first foray into this particular area of international political controversy. Our 2008 album International House closed with a song called Taxidermist Zoo, which was about the occupied territories during the Sharon-era crackdown against the second Intifada. (The title comes from a kind of bloodless New York Times article at that time describing a zoo comprised of stuffed animals in the West Bank, made from the carcasses of the creatures formerly on display who died as a result of the ongoing Israeli attack on Palestinian society.)

In fact, International House was almost entirely made up of topical songs, from the opener Welcome To It (about the Washington consensus and global domination), to Enter The Mind (rendering prisoners and torture), to For Your Majesty’s Amusement (people powered revolutions), and so on. Then there’s, well, Volcano Man, which is about … I don’t know … something.

Cousin Rick’s Contribution

I suppose you could say our most overtly political album was Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, if only because it focused exclusively on former Texas governor Rick Perry and his exploits in the 2012 presidential election. That said, it was also our silliest album by far, made up of songs culled from our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, in which we took delight in roasting Rick and other strange public figures in the political space. (Cousin Rick was such a rich vein for that sort of thing – the songs practically wrote themselves.)

Some of the songs on 2000 Years to Christmas had some political shadings, but that was not the driving theme by any means. Our most recent album, In Retrograde, however, has no overt politics, just stuff about love and angst and loss and wanting shit to happen – you know, the usual stuff pop songs are made of. Took kind of a hard turn on that one. I mean, typically even our topical songs contain a little bit of honey, but that sucker was the whole hive and then some.

We’re Number One!

Can’t remember who said, come up with a category no one ever heard of and be the best at it. Well, I can’t make that claim for Big Green, but what I can say is that we are the single least commercially successful band of our generation. That’s a superlative we totally own. No one who has written and released as much material as we have has sold fewer units …. no-body. Hey – somebody had to do it!

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Let the sleigh bells play and the reindeer ring: your Big Green holiday playlist

Well, it’s that magical season again, people – the time of year when otherwise fairly normal people enter a state of frenzy, turning themselves inside-out to purchase holiday consumer items for family and friends before the 25th of December. Where’s the magic in that, you may ask? No man can say.

For your friends in Big Green, it’s time to look back at where the hell we’ve been all these years. We are more than a quarter century past the release date of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and while it hasn’t achieved holiday classic status as of yet (give it another fifty!), it does get a few plays here and there. And yeah, we DO listen to some of them, goosing the numbers a bit I suppose. Anywho, here’s my personal Big Green yuletide playlist:

Pagan Christmas

As I mentioned last year, Pagan Christmas tends to be a holiday favorite around this time of year among a select few, typically wiccans and assorted pagan. They’re always good for a few hundred streams, and it does well on YouTube (by our standard, which is pretty small potatoes). It’s kind of upbeat with a pretty simple lyric:

You’re a standing invitation
You’re a complete stranger at the top of the list
You’re just like a relation
You’ll be right there with us while we’re tearing away at our gifts
And you’ll stand there gleaming with a ton of decorations

You’re not very different
In a couple of minutes I’ll be heating you up
You’re not very different
In a couple of hours I’ll be serving you up on a plate
And you’ll sit there gleaming with a ton of trimmings at your side

Have yourself a Merry Pagan Christmas Sacrifice

Hear it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Merry Christmas Jane

One of my personal holiday favorites from the broader Big Green catalog is the live version of Merry Christmas Jane, which we tossed up on YouTube some time ago. This one features the nimble-fingered Jeremy Shaw on guitar, and it goes something like this:

Christmas Is All Done

Okay, this one was never commercially released, but we dropped it on YouTube a couple of years ago. It’s a song Matt wrote and we recorded sometime in the nineties, one of the first tracks we finished on our Tascam DA-88, the deck we would later use to record 2000 Years to Christmas. I always liked the atmosphere of this one, though I think Matt wanted to choke me for posting it. (He’s more of a perfectionist than I am … he and nearly all the rest of humanity.)

One Small Step

Okay, now I know what you’re going to say – that ain’t no Christmas song! Actually, it started life as a holiday number, the original version recorded with the group that included Christmas Is All Done. We resurrected it years later, added parts, then released One Small Step as a single. It is one of those rare Big Green releases that has an actual video associated with it. The original Christmas reference in the lyric was written out – it was pretty obscure, in any case.

All Saints Come

This is another number from 2000 Years To Christmas. I particularly like this track because it probably sounds more like we actually sounded as a performing band than any song on that album. It’s a bit of a dirge, but it’s got some crunch to it, and there’s nothing I like more around Christmas time than a little crunch.

What’s new for the New Year?

Well, it’s coming down fast, isn’t it? In 2026 we should be starting production on our next collection of songs, most of which have been written but not tracked. We plan to release a new single sometime early in the year – I’ll be posting about that in the coming weeks. Until then, keep the cards, letters, emails, posts, and rocks coming, have a safe and happy holiday, and don’t forget to tip the wait staff – they work effing hard and deserve every cent.

Joe offers a fine holiday howdy

PEACE OUT, PEOPLE!

News

A quarter century of making pagans dance.

Is it that time of year yet again? Christ on a bike, people! The pace of passing Christmases brings to mind that Mitt Romney song – “Christmas Green” – from an early episode of Ned Trek, featured on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN:

Each second day is Christmas
preceded by its eve
Consumers take your places
We want every shop left clean

Investors won’t be waiting
All registers will ring
Flood their chests with riches
It runs like a machine
And Christmas is so green

As it happens, this is a milestone holiday season for your friends at Big Green. Our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, was released 25 years ago this year. That’s right, it is now officially 1,975 years to Christmas, depending on which way you’re counting. Tempus fugit, am I right?

With a rocket (albeit a slow one)

Did “2000 Years” become a holiday classic over the last quarter century, working its jolly way into Christmas playlists far and wide? Well … no, not really. Like pretty much all of our music, it’s been a drug on the market. (That’s an archaic expression that once was synonymous with “a flop”.) We’re niche players over here at Big Green; an acquired taste, if you will.

That said, there is one song from that album that goes off like a minor rocket every year around this time. It’s called Pagan Christmas, and it briefly became a favorite among wiccan and wiccan-adjacent communities in the northeast. Starting late November, early December, Pagan Christmas starts racking up a fair number of streaming plays on the various platforms. (It’s even done okay-ish on our YouTube channel.)

Of course, if you want to help pump the numbers a little bit, you can find us on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever the hell. It’s Christmas, man …. throw us a bone!

More where that came from

Now, I’ve said plenty of times that the songs on 2000 Years To Christmas represent only a small portion of the Christmas-themed songs we’ve written (and when I say “we”, I mean mostly my brother Matt). Over the years we’ve recorded a number of them, some of which we’ve played on THIS IS BIG GREEN. Those include Ned Trek tracks, but we also have scads of songs from back in the nineties when most of 2000 Years was written and demo-ed.

Of course, before we release THAT stuff, we need to finish our current album. That project is now in the mastering stage. We’re also working on the cover art, the hand-tooled vinyl binding, and the carved oak box that it all comes in. Hey … it takes time to whittle all them things. BE PATIENT. We’ve got something like 24 new songs coming your way this Spring, so lookout. Don’t know if there’s anything in there to make the pagans happy, but we’ll see.

Moment of shizzle

Ahem …. On behalf of all of us here at Big Green, have a happy holiday season, a merry Christmas if you celebrate, and try to make it to the new year, for crying out loud. If you’re a musician and you’re playing somewhere New Year’s eve, drive carefully (or not at all) and remember, that money has to last until March.