Passenger

Joe writes: It can take a long time to break an artist. ie music, who manage Robbie Williams, have been managing Passenger for 11 years and finally things seem to be coming together for him. I tried to see him play at Great Escape earlier in the year, got the stage time wrong so arrived just after he had come off stage, and was amazed to see hundreds of people filing out. And now his excellent song Let Her Go has gone to no. 1 in both Belgium and The Netherlands.



His music has very pleasant echoes of Cat Stevens so here's The Wind:

Christmas In Prison with John Prine

Joe writes: A recent discovery for me that is already one of my favourite Christmas songs, not least thanks to the couplet "I dream of her always/Even when I don't dream/Her name's on my tongue/And her blood's in my stream." The original version isn't on YouTube so I've experimented with embedding from Spotify:



There is a later, possibly better, studio take on YouTube.

Talking of Christmas songs, here's a wonderful article by Dorian Lynskey about Fairytale Of New York. I always wondered how that extraordinary song came about.