Greetings, and welcome back from the Land of Tryptophan! I hope you all enjoyed your long weekend as much as I did.

As you can see below, I’ve posted the annual Jefitoblog Holiday Mix; I meant to write a little note to go along with it, but I ran out of time, and it was more important to me to get it up the day after Thanksgiving than to stick my two cents in. If you’re the type to listen to this stuff absurdly early, I hope you’ve been enjoying the tunes. If not, don’t worry — normal blog restrictions don’t apply to the Holiday Mix, and it’ll be up until Christmas.

And speaking of holiday music, I got my first-ever guest post invitation from the Lovely Mrs. Davis a few weeks ago, which is why you can get even more yule tunes by clicking here. Bonus!

On that note, here’s what else I’m up to at non-Jefitoblog locations (in other words, Bullz-Eye) this week:

Tim Finn’s Imaginary Kingdom :
(”Generally speaking, Finn’s seventh solo album is cut from the same cloth as previous releases; in typical Finn family fashion, its songs are equal parts atmospheric, indelibly melodic, willfully abstruse, and heartrendingly beautiful.”)

Nickel Creek’s Reasons Why :
(”It isn’t perfect, of course, but it couldn’t have been. Part of what makes Nickel Creek so exciting for a lot of its fans is the same thing that makes a sensible, comprehensive single-disc overview impossible; namely, the band’s growing fascination with music that bends or breaks the boundaries of folk and bluegrass.”)

Joan Osborne’s Pretty Little Stranger :
(”There’s so little range Á¢€” of either melody or tempo Á¢€” that on the rare occasions when everything actually clicks, as with Osborne’s cover of Patty Griffin’s “What You Are,” it’s actually somewhat jolting.”)

I had planned on the Holiday Mix marking the end of my blogging year, and that’ll probably be mostly the case. I’m going to be trying to put together a few new things during the hiatus — posts that involve other blogs and other writers, and what the hell, maybe even a podcast — things that have been too time-consuming for me to touch for the last six months. I have some very vague ideas I may be bouncing off some of you. (If you get a feverish, hard-to-understand e-mail from me in the next several weeks, in other words, it probably isn’t just the eggnog talkin’.)

Anyway, as it stands right now, I don’t plan on posting any more of our ‘regularly scheduled’ content until January, but I do know that CAPTAIN VIDEO! will be paying us a visit before Christmas, and I’m sure there’ll be some other stuff going on around here too. Don’t change that channel!

About the Author

Jeff Giles

Jeff Giles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Popdose and Dadnabbit, as well as an entertainment writer whose work can be seen at Rotten Tomatoes and a number of other sites. Hey, why not follow him at Twitter while you're at it?

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