Oh, don’t give me that disappointed look, you jerks. The whole idea behind this series is “listening to new music from artists who aren’t supposed to have any,” and who fits that description better than a dead man?

Dan Fogelberg died on December 16, 2007, after a three-year battle with prostate cancer — a date I’m painfully aware of, because his music has been featured twice in Mellowmas. The first year, we gleefully trashed “Same Old Lang Syne,” coining the word “Fogelfuck” and generally tinkling all over one of the greatest hits of an all-around nice guy who was fighting for his life, which, as you can imagine, didn’t go over well with the Fogelfans. This only encouraged us to go back for more the next year, and we hated on Fogelberg’s “At Christmas Time” in a column that posted just a few days before Fogelberg’s death. Whoops!

Naturally, when I found out Fogelberg’s widow was arranging for the release of this posthumous album, my thoughts immediately turned to You Again? — and because nobody else understands the wrath of the Fogelmasses as well as Jason, I quickly e-mailed him to ask him what he thought about me featuring the new album in this column. Jason, being a nice guy, totally freaked out and insisted that it was a terrible, terrible idea, at which point I called him a pussy, got the affirmation I needed from Michael Parr and David Lifton, and set about writing this column.

Moral of the story: Jason Hare is a sensitive man, and whatever you read here isn’t his fault. He really tried to stop me. (more…)