This Christmas Day Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas Eve and Other Stories (1996)
For of all the dreams
You were the first I knew
And every other one
Was a charade of you
You stayed close when I was far away
Merry Christmas!
To round out my Twenty-Five Days of TSO, the last song is This Christmas Day, part three of The Ornament Trilogy.
It’s Christmas Day. She’s coming home!
The prayers of the father and the girl had been answered, with the help of an angel, by some bums who called their Old City Bar home, and delivered the sparkling Ornament back home on This Christmas Day.
Christmas looks out for us and gives us something to dream about during the darkest time of the year. It brings people together and makes it easier to believe that there is good in all people, or that our sins might be forgiven by those that we’ve slighted. It’s snow and magic and wonder.
(Note: Check back tomorrow for a bonus track. Santa visited us today and gave us tickets to see Tran-Siberian Orchestra live on December 26th! Merry Christmas to us!)
(Note 2: I’ve had a blast revisiting these songs. I’m considering doing this again with other bands or artists that I enjoy. Maybe with a little more relaxed schedule than 25 posts in 25 days, but we’ll see. Maybe I’ll even consider doing the next round as a podcast, though doing that, I should work on getting the rights to some of the tracks to play right in the audio of the podcast and not rely on a playlist or videos… we’ll see.)
To hear the full Twenty-Five Days of TSO Playlist on Google Play Music, click the link below.
Old City Bar Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas Eve and Other Stories (1996)
And here was the danger
Even with strangers
Inside of this night,
It’s easier to believe
In part two of The Ornament Trilogy, the angel follows the father’s prayer from Ornament and find’s the child, cold and alone and on a street corner in New York City, in the snowy city, no stars are to be seen, save for a neon star advertising an old city bar, the sort that always has its regulars regardless of time of day or time of year. The girl then made a wish on that first star that she’d seen. And the angel, being an angel, could also capture her wish.
The angel then takes the form of a child and wanders into the bar, inspiring the bartender to help the girl get home.
For me this is the magic of Christmas, the magic of real people, no matter how unlikely, suspending disbelief and giving to those who are more in need. Even if we might think that those poor bums in that bar should be home, should be with family. Who is to say that they aren’t just where they should be, even at Christmas.
To hear the full Twenty-Five Days of TSO Playlist on Google Play Music, click the link below.
Ornament Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas Eve and Other Stories (1996)
Somewhere the wind
Carves moments in the snow
And if he sees her
He never lets it show
He just drifts behind her
Erasing every step
And for the final three days of my little experiment, I’m going to share one of my favorite sets of songs, the three songs that make up what I’ve always called The Ornament Trilogy. These three songs are all featured on their first albums and have been on RIDICULOUSLY high rotation in our household since the beginning. So much so that my kids have been able to sing along to them since they were little and my son even sang this song during a Christmas recital last year for the music studio where he takes voice lessons.
The first song sets the stage. A father is home on Christmas, he and his daughter had a fight, causing her to leave home. She ran off to New York City. A fight of some sort or another was the last straw, causing her to leave and our angel is flying over the man’s home when he catches the prayer of the father on it’s way up to the Lord. He is praying to Christmas, praying that she’ll be safe, watched over. Even if he can’t be with her, if he can’t see her on Christmas, he wants to know that she’s being looked after.
To hear the full Twenty-Five Days of TSO Playlist on Google Play Music, click the link below.
Forget About the Blame (Moon Version) Trans-Siberian Orchestra Letters from the Labyrinth (2015)
But you sit right there
Like you don’t care
And you tell me that your life’s not fair
But we all have our own cross to bear
Trans-Siberian Orchestra have songs about love, but this is one isn’t in the context of a story, it’s not part of some grand tale of characters that we’re following through Christmas or through the last night of Beethoven.
This rocker is a straight up song about love on the rocks. People love each other, and in our everyday lives we don’t have angels or demons or gargoyles on our side getting us to mend our broken relationships. Sometimes we need to sit down and do the work and focus on the good and forget about the blame.
Originally, TSO recorded this with a male vocalist (Sun Version), but decided to get the female perspective on the tune and enlisted Lzzy Hale of Halestorm to sing this version of the track. This version is my favorite of the two.
To hear the full Twenty-Five Days of TSO Playlist on Google Play Music, click the link below.
Stay Trans-Siberian Orchestra Letters from the Labyrinth (2015)
Night time
Wander the street
You never give ground
Never retreat
You’re always Oz bound
Have all the dreams been betrayed
The last weekend before Christmas and I’m sharing another pair of non-Christmas tunes, both from the 2015 album, Letters from the Labyrinth. Letters is a different sort of album for TSO as it’s not a rock opera, instead the songs have different themes throughout.
The song Stay was first featured as a bonus track on a 1997 re-release of the 1987 album Hall of the Mountain King. Yep… Savatage did a version of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King long before they were combining Classical music and Heavy Metal as TSO.
In this remake of the Savatage tune, Stay features a vocal performance by Adrienne Warren. Her sultry vocals are a huge departure from the way Jon Oliva’s deep masculine bass set a dark mood for the song in the original.
The song warns of the danger of getting too far down the path of seeking dreams without changing them as your life changes. In this version, the dreams are so much more alluring as they are described through the feminine vocal
To hear the full Twenty-Five Days of TSO Playlist on Google Play Music, click the link below.
For the Sake of Our Brother Trans-Siberian Orchestra The Lost Christmas Eve (2004)
In a stable, in a manger
In the cold winters air
In the arms of his mother
A child’s lying there
This is the last song that Daryl Pediford released with TSO, he passed away shortly after recording this track and knowing that adds a certain haunting quality to the already haunting track.
The vocals are so heart-wrenching and painful knowing that there is a child who was abandoned, that a soul still bleeds for the choice he made to do so.
It’s so dark, so painful. But if Christmas can offer the hope of redemption for those of us who are looking to pass through this year into the next, it should be able to offer redemption to those who have wounds and sins that they carry with them for far longer than just the year.
The best part of this piece for me is when it changes mid-song into a great rendition of Oh Come, all ye Faithful.
To hear the full Twenty-Five Days of TSO Playlist on Google Play Music, click the link below.