2024 Christmas Podcast Day: Unreleased Songs From Holiday Adverts

Today we have a very special post, to celebrate a very special November 1st holiday.

No, I’m not talking about Prime Meridian Day, or National Deep Fried Clams Day or even World Vegan Day. While those are all wonderful holidays in their own right, I’m talking about Christmas Podcast Day!

Christmas Podcast Day, celebrated each November 1st is a day when members of the Christmas podcast community get together to release somewhat synchronized episodes of their shows. Some years there is a shared theme, like last year when it was the Charles Dickens’ classic, “A Christmas Carol.” Other years, like this year, it’s a do-your-own-thing affair.

‘Tis the Soundtrack started back in February of this year, so this is my first Christmas Podcast Day. And since I was left to my own devices, naturally I waited until the absolute last minute to throw this post together.

I wrote this late in the evening, October 30th. I’ll be recording the podcast episode Halloween morning before work and I’ll be editing it while handing out candy to trick-or-treaters…because we celebrate on Oct 31st…even when it falls on a Thursday

But communities moving Halloween to more convenient weekend dates is an irksome topic for another podcast. So let’s stop yelling at kids on our lawns and get back to Christmas Podcast Day!

Christmas Podcast Day is kind of like a Whitman’s Holiday Sampler. You can listen to a whole mess of hosts cover an equally extensive list of topics, all in the Christmas orbit. Then, just when you think you’re done, you realize that underneath that crinkly plastic tray is a second entire level with just as many podcasts as the first.

And since I’ve kind of boxed myself (pun completely intended) into a corner with this metaphor, let me wrap it up by saying that you can head over to https://christmaspodcasts.com and sample what everyone has contributed to our somewhat-official holiday.

And may everything you hear be just as sweet as biting into one of those mystery chocolates and realizing you hit the jackpot - Dark Chocolate Butter Cream. Unless you’re one of those sadists whose love of Orange Cream is only rivaled by your love of watching the looks of revulsion on everyone else’s faces when they accidentally sink their teeth into one. I’m guessing you’re the same person that roots for the mines in minesweeper.

For our first Christmas Podcast Day post, we’re talking about one of my favorite topics, the music of holiday advertisements. And since we wanted to do something extra special for today’s episode, we’re going to look at a trio of songs from Christmas advertisements that only exist in those advertisements.

In some cases, an entire song was never produced, just enough to fill the background of a 30-second TV spot while a voiceover extolls the virtues of holiday shopping. This means if you want to listen to any of these songs, you’ll have to fire up YouTube and watch the actual adverts, voiceovers and all. Well, except for one…kind of, but we’ll get to that later.

The first song we’re looking at today is an alternate version of “My Patch” by English artist Jim Noir that was created for Target’s 2007 holiday ad campaign “Christmas Countdown Calendar.”

The campaign featured multiple TV commercials, each panning over an Advent Calendar, while the doors open to reveal scenes like people partaking in holiday activities or kids playing with the hottest toys of the year, before ending with a simple, “Merry Christmas” message.

The song “My Patch”, which was released two years earlier, first on an EP of the same name, then as the lead track on the debut Jim Noir album, Tower of Love has nothing to do with Christmas or the holidays.

For the Target campaign, a new version of the song was recorded with the chorus changed from “If you ever step on my patch / I’ll bring you down, I’ll bring you down” to “Holidays are times of magic / We’re counting down, we’re counting down”.

So who sang this new version?

According to the Jim Noir Wikipedia page, this holiday version was performed by an unknown artist. And the Jim Noir bio on Universal Music adds even less clarity, just stating that “My Patch” was used in the campaign.

I did find a forum discussion from back in November 2007 that attributed the vocals to a Chris Barron. Who could possibly be Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors…or another musician with the same name…or just completely bad information as I haven’t been able to confirm it anywhere else.

What I can say is that this version of the song has never appeared outside of the holiday adverts and that it’s highly unlikely a full version was ever recorded. Which is too bad, it’s a bouncy, catchy little electronic indie tune.

For the next song we’re exploring, we’re going to turn the dial back one more year to 2006 and take a look at the commercials created for that year’s perennial JCPenney “Unwrap the Magic” campaign.

Unlike the year prior, where the JCP TV spots featured ELO’s “Livin’ Thing,” which you can read about here, or listen to on episode 9 of the podcast, for 2006 JCPenney went an entirely different direction. They smashed together Bing Crosby’s iconic version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” featuring the Andrews Sisters with the Fat Boy Slim track, “It’s A Wonderful Night” from his 2004 album Palookaville.

And the results were good…really good. And people thought so back when the commercial originally dropped 18 years ago too.

While the original YouTube video from 2006 was purged some time ago, the comments were full of folks asking if the song was going to be released. There was even a reply by one of the individuals who worked on the advert music. Their response, which has been preserved in an Adtunes forum post about the commercial stated that they worked for I Dig Music, the Chicago company tapped to produce the track. They created a minute plus of audio, from which 30 seconds were cut for the advert.

They also shared that Fatboy Slim’s US representation reached back out to I Dig Music afterward to, in their words, “blow the whole thing out to a full remix.” The poster was encouraging folks who liked the song to email Norman Cook’s label and management asking for it.

Unfortunately, a full remix was never produced…and it appears that I Dig Music is no longer in business.

But, unlike the Target version of “My Patch,” this song’s story didn’t quite end with the commercial…sort of. While I Dig Music never produced a full remix, about 10 years ago, a Christmas saint by the name of Randall Bruder accepted the mission. Using the 30-second commercial spot as a blueprint, he punched out the mashup to a full two-minute remix.

His track, titled “Here Comes A Wonderful Night” is availabe on both Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

And for our final song of the show, we’re turning back to Target, but this time skipping ahead to 2021. That year Target was running a year-long advertising campaign titled, “What We Value Most Shouldn’t Cost More.” During the summer, the campaign adverts featured the Black Pumas song “Colors,” from the band’s 2019 self-titled and debut studio album.

For the campaign’s holiday adverts, Target once again tapped Black Pumas who partnered with Mexican artist Sofia Reyes to record a cover of the Emotions’ “Best of My Love.”

And this version (or at least the bit of it you can hear behind the voice-over in the commercials) is fantasic!

Like the other two songs we discussed tonight, this one has never been made available outside of the commercials. I even attempted to leverage AI to find this song for me. After a few failed attempts at crafting my prompt with Copilot, which thought I was trying to get it to download copyrighted material, I successfully asked if there was anywhere I could legally stream the song.

And then I recieved a complete hallucination of a response, with the Go-bot overlord telling me emphatically that the song was available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube Music and Deezer. Only to then backtrack when I challenged it to produce a direct URL to any of the named sources and instead suggest that these are the types of services that would potentially have the track at some point and that I should check them regularly. Thanks robot.

But, from the information in the Target press release announcing the adverts back in 2021, I do believe a full version of this song was recorded and, with the recentness of the adverts, there is a much better chance this one gets a full release down the road. And while we wait to see if that is a present Santa delivers us this year, we do have another holiday track by Black Pumas. It’s their 2020 cover of Lou Rawls’ “Christmas Will Really Be Christmas.”

As always, I want to thank you for checking out ‘Tis the Soundtrack. If you’re a regular here, it’s likely you’re already familiar with the many other wonderful shows and hosts that make up the Christmas Podcast Network. But I still encourage you to check out all the Christmas Podcast Day episodes available at https://christmaspodcasts.com. A few new faces…or voices I suppose, like my own, have joined the Christmas podcast space this year and it’s a great way to find something new to help you keep that Christmas spirit going all year long.

And if you’re a new friend and possibly found your way here via Christmas Podcast Day, welcome! I hope you enjoyed this post and our look at some obscure songs from holiday adverts. As I said at the top, this is one of my favorite topics to cover and this post (and the accompanying podcast episode) are good examples of the content and tone of ‘Tis the Soundtrack.

So, to my friends both new and old, cheers and Mery Christmas Podcast Day!