Wayne Coyne in Christmas on Mars. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Ten seasons ago, the weirdest holiday movie you’ve likely never heard of, Christmas on Mars, by Oklahoma indie-rock eccentrics the Flaming Lips, was released to both bafflement and acclaim (OK, mostly bafflement), and it became an instant cult classic.

The wacky production — delayed multiple times due to the unexpected success and ensuing promotion of the band’s albums The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots — took about $200,000 of the Lips’ own money and seven years to make. (“I’m not sure if I’m embarrassed about it or if I’m proud of it,” the band’s mastermind/frontman, Wayne Coyne, says of that long wait.) So, by the time Christmas on Mars finally made its official premiere at the 2008 Sasquatch! music festival, the film had already become the stuff of legend.

However, despite all the mythology and speculation surrounding Christmas on Mars, the finished product is actually way more bonkers than even the most diehard Lips fan could have imagined.

Starring Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd as Major Syrtis, an astronaut on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Coyne as an antenna-headed, Santa-suited green alien; Fred Armisen, Adam Goldberg, and, in a longer and even-lesser-seen DVD director’s cut, Elijah Wood and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock; and a fleet of giant marching vulvas, the lo-fi sci-fi flick focuses on a Christmas pageant celebrating the birth of the first baby born on the newly colonized planet Mars.

Got all that? OK, so none of it makes very much sense. Maybe that’s because it all started as an excuse for the band to record an album of “bizarre classical-music-meets-space-age-music-meets-music-from-the-future” with the Christmas on Mars title. “This idea of making a movie was kind of a way for us to make a soundtrack to a movie, but the movie didn’t exist,” Coyne tells Yahoo Entertainment. However, like many of the Lips’ fantastical ideas — Zaireeka, an experimental release requiring four CDs to be played simultaneously for four different stereo systems; those limited-edition songs the Lips issued on a USB drive buried inside a life-sized, edible gummy skull; the Dead Petz side project with Miley Cyrus — Christmas on Mars is, a decade later, a fascinating example of Coyne’s rampant, unchecked creativity at work.

“I think [making Christmas on Mars] showed me a lot about the way that I could start to do any of my ideas, any of my art, and all that, from then on,” says Coyne. “No one was demanding that we finish it. It was only my own desire to sort of say, ‘No, we must do this.’”

Speaking of “movies that don’t exist,” when Coyne decided to make Christmas on Mars, he was inspired by some very un-sugarplum-like visions that danced in his mother’s head many Christmases ago. When Coyne and his older brother came home late from a night out, his mother attempted to tell them about a strange space movie she’d just seen on television, and her wildly disjointed recap remained in his brain throughout the years.

“It goes back to a ‘movie’ my mother had seen, which now I know wasn’t a movie. It was a combination of some movies that she saw, because she would fall asleep on the couch watching movies late at night,” Coyne laughs. “I remember one night she thought she saw this movie, but it wasn’t until much later, after she died, that we figured out she didn’t really see one movie — she saw three movies, and she was falling asleep off and on and connecting them in between. We searched forever to find this movie that she thought she saw.”

Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd in Christmas on Mars. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Between 2001 and 2007, the Lips labored to bring Mama Coyne’s fake dream-state movie to the screen, sporadically shooting Christmas on Mars (at first on 16mm film, and then later, as home moviemaking technology rapidly advanced, on digital formats) at various locales around their native OKC — including dilapidated industrial facilities and homemade sets in Coyne’s compound of connected houses and backyard.

“Some of it we would shoot literally just in my house. I have a huge, crazy house in Oklahoma City,” Coyne says. “At the time, the back part of the house was still being renovated, so there would be rooms that were kind of just tore up, and I made them look like they were rooms inside a space station or whatever on Mars. … At the time, there was a crack house that was an abandoned little shack that was in the back of one of these houses that I had recently bought, and instead of tearing it down, I just turned it into another scene. So I’m literally shooting in my house, and literally shooting in my own backyard, and the scene that’s got Fred Armisen in it is shot in that crack house.”

Fred Armisen in Christmas on Mars. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Coyne also shot in Austin during the 2004 South by Southwest festival to accommodate Goldberg’s schedule, and it turned out to be well worth it. “I said, ‘Well, if you’re gonna be there for four days, I’ll build a set in Austin. All you gotta do is come over there.’ He said, ‘If you can do that, dude, I’ll be yours for a whole day and a whole night. Whatever it takes, from the beginning of the morning to the end of the night.’ He had, like, four pages of dialogue, and I saw him literally go off to a room 20 minutes before we shot, read through it, and then he came in and did probably 50 takes. Every one of the takes was stunning. I remember we would forget that we were even shooting a movie. We’d be like, ‘Oh, f***. Sorry. Cut!’ He was so amazing.”

Coyne admits with a self-deprecating chuckle and a shrug that he and his bandmates and cast of assembled local pals weren’t as skilled at acting as Goldberg, but he believes that is part of the film’s DIY charm. “There’s bits of it where the acting is weird, or it’s awkward, or bad, or ridiculous, but that was our way of saying, ‘I know, but this is us making a movie. We’re not really trying to win the Cannes Film Festival this year. We’re just making this with our friends and our family. It really is a vehicle by which we can put our music and other abstract ideas into.’ … And you know, I’m not trying to be a movie director. I wasn’t waiting on someone to call me and say, ‘Hey, we saw Christmas on Mars. Would you wanna make our movie?’ I’m just making my own movie, my own way. This isn’t me auditioning for other director’s parts!”

The result wasn’t exactly a feel-good family film: Ten years later, Christmas on Mars is still best remembered for the above-mentioned vulva-army scene, set to an experimental instrumental titled “The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia.” (Side note/fun fact: A year after Christmas on Mars’s brief theatrical release, the Flaming Lips expounded upon their weird version of this “nativity scene” of sorts, by releasing a limited-edition Christmas tree ornament shaped like a fetus.)

Coyne breathlessly attempts to explain this vaginal symbolism to Yahoo Entertainment. “It went along the concept that this baby was being born outside of its real mother [in a manmade plastic space-womb], and that this is the way babies will be born 100 years from now. They’ll be in an incubated thing looked over by the parents, but it won’t actually be inside the woman or man. That was the concept there,” he begins. “So, the one main character [Drozd’s Major Syrtis], he’s haunted. He sees this baby in there, and he’s living on Mars, and the oxygen’s weird, and the oxygen generator breaks. All these things sort of cause him to have this breakdown, which leads to hallucinations. And so this dream that he thinks he’s having is really a hallucination the entire space station is having. Somehow on some deep humanistic level, this way of a baby being born, without being inside of its mother, is causing some humanistic break. And that’s what they were trying to come to grips with. That’s what that parade is. He’s telling people about this horrible dream of the baby being crushed by a marching band whose heads are … yeah, they’re giant, flopping women’s vaginas.

“Yeah. I mean, it’s a scene that only we would make.”

Obviously the dystopian Christmas on Mars has more in common with Eraserhead than with popular holiday fare like, say, It’s a Wonderful Life or Love, Actually. But Coyne insists that, despite all of its disturbing imagery and soundtrack song titles like “The Horrors of Isolation: The Celestial Dissolve, Triumphant Hallucination, Light Being Absorbed,” “The Secret of Immortality: This Strange Feeling, This Impossible World,” “Space Bible with Volume Lumps,” and “In Excelsior Vaginalistic,” the movie does offer a Christmas-appropriate, if vague, message of hope.

“To me, Christmas on Mars is like a situation,” Coyne explains. “Mars is the situation that this is completely brutal, and this is completely unknown. And we don’t know what to do. And you know, we invented Christmas on the darkest day in the northern part of the world. On the darkest days of the year, we put lights in our trees. And that’s what I would tell everybody: On the darkest days of your life, you have to put lights in your trees, whatever your ‘trees’ may be. It’s like you saying, ‘I know I’m playing along with this ridiculous fantasy, but it actually works.’ That’s what we mean when we say ‘Christmas on Mars.’ Christmas is the made-up fantasy scenario that will bring you happiness in the face of this utter unknown, bleak void.”

A decade after the Flaming Lips released Christmas on Mars into the void, Coyne is still celebrating Christmas as only he can — the Lips just released their own psychedelic version of the beloved Bing Crosby/David Bowie duet, “Peace on Earth”/“Little Drummer Boy” — and he’s looking forward to new holiday traditions in 2019, when he and his girlfriend, Katy Weaver, will welcome their first child, a son. “For me, every day when you’re a little boy is like Christmas already. … I mean, for me, I get to live like a whole ’nother life now. This is the beginning of my second life. I’m like, ‘Let’s go, motherf***er!’” he says. “Our house is already made for little kids, and we don’t always get that much sleep already, so it’s not gonna be that much different for us.”

As for whether Christmas on Mars will ever become a more widely viewed or loved holiday classic in decades to come, Coyne knows that, like fruitcake, the film is an acquired taste. “We do make weird f***ing music. Not everybody in the world’s gonna understand it,” he admits. “But I feel like the people that do understand it are people that understand it the way I do. It’s emotional. We’re not just having a party. It’s hitting something very down to the core. I think Christmas on Mars has that reach, too. It’s not trying to really entertain you on your conscious level.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (Photo: Sony Home Pictures Entertainment/The Jim Henson Company)

When songwriting legend Paul Williams met Muppets mastermind Jim Henson in 1976, after appearing on The Muppet Show, the fateful encounter led to a long and fruitful musical partnership, highlighted by Williams’s Oscar-nominated theme for The Muppet Movie, “Rainbow Connection.”

But it all started with the 1977 HBO cult classic Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which will be screened in theaters nationwide for the first time ever this month, on Dec. 9 and 16. And incredibly, Williams’s twangy Emmet Otter soundtrack has finally been officially released, just in time for this holiday season, with a previously unheard song, “Born in a Trunk,” that didn’t make it to air.

“It was such a wonderful, wonderful little thing to work on. A great story, a spiritual lesson, wrapped up in a children’s Christmas tale,” Williams tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It was the beginnings of a relationship that has lasted for decades and decades, and one of the great lucky breaks in my life.”

Tragically, Williams’s partnership with Jim Henson came to an unexpected end in 1990, when Henson died at age 53 from toxic shock syndrome — although Williams did work on another Jim Henson Company holiday production, The Muppet Christmas Carol, two years after Henson’s death. But in a poignant full-circle moment, Henson requested that one of Williams’s Emmet Otter ballads, “When the River Meets the Sea,” be played at his memorial, which was held at New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on May 21, 1990. Jerry Nelson — the actor who’d provided the original Emmet character’s voice, and had also reprised “When the River Meets the Sea” as the diminutive Muppet frog Robin on John Denver’s 1979 Christmas special — performed the song at Henson’s service as a duet with Louise Gold. (Nelson passed away in 2012.)

Recalling that sad day, Williams says the various Muppeteers who performed at the memorial “gave a sense of Jim still being there.” And it was perhaps the ultimate, if bittersweet, compliment to Williams’s songwriting that this Emmet Otter song and its beautiful, timeless sentiment had meant that much to Henson.

“I think it was in Jim’s instructions, that he wanted it in there. He had very carefully laid out what he wanted [at his memorial]. I’m sure when he wrote it out, he had no idea that it was going to happen as early and as quickly as it did. Which is an amazing loss. That song is a favorite, and the only thing that ever disappointed me about it is that it had to be played at Jim’s service,” Williams says somberly.

As for why Henson connected so much with “When the River Meets the Sea,” Williams speculates, “I think it’s the message: ‘When the mountain touches the valley/All the clouds are taught to fly/As our souls will leave this land most peacefully/Though our minds be filled with questions/In our hearts we’ll understand/When the river meets the sea/Like a flower that has blossomed/In the dry and barren sand/We are born and born again most gracefully.’

“My favorite line in the song is actually, ‘Like a baby when it is sleeping/In its loving mother’s arms/What a newborn baby dreams is a mystery/But his life will find a purpose/And in time he’ll understand/When the river meets the sea.’ I think that one of the common elements in the songs that I care most about, that I’ve written for Jim and for the Muppets, are songs that don’t have answers, but honor the question.”

Most of Williams’s Emmet Otter soundtrack memories are happier ones. He was already a longtime Henson fan, dating back to Henson’s puppet creations appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was a regular road ritual for Williams to watch Sesame Street when on tour. “It was the ’60s and early ’70s, and in those days, I was usually imbibing heavily and it was a little crazy,” says Williams, who has been sober for the past 28 years. “But you wake up in the morning and you’re watching Bert and Ernie, and there’s something calming, sort of an infusion of spiritual health and humor that you always got from the Muppets.”

Williams was therefore delighted when Henson offered him the Emmet Otter job — but he was also surprised, since the music he was writing at the time for the Carpenters and Three Dog Night was a far cry from the bluegrass/alt-country fare needed for a band of a shaggy, washtub-banging, banjo-strumming otters living in a rustic village called Frogtown Hollow.

“I had no real background in Americana; I wasn’t somebody that followed that kind of music. I mean, I liked Hank Williams and traditional country and the like, but none of these songs were right down the pike for me,” says Williams. However, the TV special’s Gift of the Magi-like story, based on a children’s book by Russell Hoban, inspired him immediately. “Those were the easiest songs I think I’ve ever written in my life. They poured out of me. I don’t think I ever had songs come out of me so quickly for a project. They sprang forth. At some point, you give yourself to the emotion that the story inspires, and sometimes you get really lucky.”

As for whether it was a challenge at all to pen original music for otters — or for puppets in general —Williams, who says Gonzo is his all-time favorite Muppet, emphatically says, “No, because the fact is they’re not puppetry. They’re not little furry bits of felt or whatever to me.”

Paul Williams on The Muppet Show in the 1970s (Photo: ITV)

Williams was especially excited to dig into one scene featuring the soundtrack’s non-Americana anomaly, “Riverbottom Nightmare Band,” the eponymous, hard rock anti-authority anthem of Frogtown Hollow’s villainous biker gang. “’The Riverbottom Nightmare Band’ is every parent’s nightmare. I don’t know anything more fun than to write something like that,” he chuckles. While the psychedelic stomper evokes Black Sabbath and Edgar Winter (and a bit of the Muppets’ Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem, for whom Williams has also composed), Williams had another inspiration.

“My favorite band ever, when I was in my late 20s, I saw a band at the Troubadour, called the Original Delaney & Bonnie. Oh my God, I love Delaney and Bonnie,” Williams gushes. “Their first album was called Accept No Substitute. They had Leon Russell on keyboard; they had at one point Eric Clapton playing guitar. It was very gospel-rock, so different from what I was writing — and listening to it, I just lit up.”

Williams, who reveals that he’s been writing recently with Portugal. The Man, adds: “Everybody assumes that I want to sit down and write that big ballad with some smooth group, but I want to write with the guys that scare me! I want a lot of angst and piercings! It’s interesting — my wife Mariana’s brother is Joe Escalante, the leader of the Vandals, a very successful punk band. And there’s part of me that keeps wanting Joe to please cover ‘Riverbottom Nightmare Band.’ Let me have the joy of hearing my brother-in-law’s band play that song!”

Despite his surprising interest in nasty hard rock and punk, Williams remains fond of Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas because of its sweet, holiday-appropriate message of sacrifice, togetherness and kindness. “I think one of the great commodities in this world is kindness; I’ll take all the kindness I can get, anytime, anywhere. And in every experience that I’ve had with Henson’s family, and with the Muppet performers, again and again and again, I felt that celestial brightness of spirit and that kindness that was Jim Henson,” he says.

And so, more than four decades later, Henson’s charming little Christmas parable about a family of underdog otters chasing their talent-show dreams is as heart-warming as ever. And Williams is grateful that its long-lost soundtrack — “one of my favorite things I’ve ever done” — is finally being heard by a wider audience and a new generation, just as Henson would have wanted.

“The people that loved Emmet Otter when it came out got married, had kids, and sat the kids down and said, ‘You’re going to watch this!’ It’s one of the reasons that I always said that the career that I have today — I lay it at the feet of the people that loved what I did in many, many years ago and passed it down. It’s exciting,” he says. “That creative spirit that we’re born with, somehow it gets tamped down or shoved out of us; something tells us that we can’t do this anymore. But Jim never, ever lost that. And more importantly, I think he activated that in his audience.”

The cast of Band Aid in 1984. (Photo: Polydor)

Thirty-four years ago, on Nov. 25, 1984, new wave’s elite came together to record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” a now-legendary holiday benefit single for Ethiopian famine relief. Most people remember that the Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof, who was inspired to do the project after watching an October 1984 BBC report about the crisis in Ethiopia, was at the helm, and that the famous song was belted by superstars like Simon Le Bon, Boy George, Sting and Bono. But not everyone realizes that Band Aid would not have existed without Midge Ure of Ultravox, who co-wrote and produced the track and even played almost all of the instruments on the final recording.

But strangely, Ure doesn’t think “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is that great a song.

“I’ve been misquoted many times as saying it’s the worst song I’ve ever written, and it’s certainly not — I’ve written much worse! — but as a song, it’s OK,” Ure tells Yahoo Entertainment with a shrug. “As a record, it’s exceptional; as a moment in time, it’s phenomenal for what it was. But as a song, meh. It’s no ‘White Christmas.’ … I still think of it as an OK song that became something much better than it actually was.”

Whether Ure’s surprisingly unenthusiastic assessment of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is correct, and even if the song has since been criticized for being patronizing and self-righteous, there’s no denying that it made a cultural impact at the time. Rush-released just days after it was recorded in a whirlwind all-nighter session at Trevor Horn’s SARM Studios in London (Horn donated the studio time, free of charge), the single shot straight to No. 1 in Britain and stayed there for five weeks — becoming the biggest-selling single in U.K. chart history at the time. It went on to sell 3.8. million copies in the United Kingdom alone, and 12 million worldwide.

The song has since been re-recorded by three other “Band Aids,” in 1989, 2004 and 2014 — but Ure confirmed last year that there will never be another be another remake, out of respect for two of the original recording’s participants, George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt, who recently passed away. However, Ure confesses, “I’m not denying that every time I hear the opening bars of that [1984] song as I’m walking around the supermarket or wherever, that opening clang still sends shivers up my spine. So, as a record, it really did achieve its goals.” The original “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” eventually raised over $24 million, and inspired other well-meaning pop-music charity efforts of the ’80s, like USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” and Geldof’s global Live Aid concerts.

Read on for Yahoo Entertainment’s interview with the man who was behind the mixing board for the legendary Band Aid session, for the inside scoop on Boy George’s near no-show, Duran Duran’s “shenanigans,” Bono’s big breakout moment, that unauthorized Tears for Fears sample, and more.

Yahoo Entertainment: Surely you must have realized you were doing something historical with Band Aid, right?

Midge Ure: I think there’s a power in naiveté, and there was an awful lot of naiveté in putting Band Aid together. Our goal at the time was simply to try and get a No. 1 record in the U.K., which would have raised in the region of 100,000 pounds. We couldn’t see beyond that. But I recall as I was driving home from the studio at 8 o’clock in the morning the next day [after the one-day recording session], Bob took a cassette to the BBC. I heard them on the radio playing the cassette, and I thought, “This is something special. The BBC don’t play cassettes!” And the moment the song finished, they played it again. And then they played it every hour on the hour — from a cassette — while the master tapes went straight to the factory to get pressed up. So, at that moment, I knew something odd had happened, something that had never happened before.

So, let’s talk about that recording session from the night before. How did you recruit all this A-list talent?

Well, when Bob gets a bit between his teeth, he doesn’t take no for an answer. So he wouldn’t speak to a manager or a record label or an agent — he would find the phone number for the artist and he’d speak to the artist himself, which was brilliant. He just cut through the red tape. While I was in the studio twiddling knobs and layering up keyboards and writing drum parts, he was on my telephone, running up huge telephone bills, because he was calling these guys all around the world! Duran Duran were on tour, Spandau Ballet were on tour, and Sting’s always on tour, so it was really difficult to nail them down. But he spoke to them directly — which in itself is exceptionally dangerous, simply because if you don’t speak to a manager, if you speak directly to an artist, there’s a very good chance that the artist is not going to write anything down. He’ll just go, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there!” — and then have no idea what it was he just agreed to do. Artists are a little bit flaky. So there was a moment when Bob and I were standing outside SARM Studios in London with camera lenses stuck in our noses, just a sea of media, and we hadn’t a clue who was going to show up. Nobody had confirmed. We’d given the date and given them the time, and kind of just hoped that they’d remember. But they all turned up! I don’t think there was one person who said they’d be there who wasn’t.

A Christmas miracle! But I heard Boy George almost didn’t make it.

George was the closest person to missing it. He was still in New York. He forgot all about it. He was sleeping in his hotel room in New York and Bob called him and said, “Where are you, you’re meant to be here!” And George said, “Oh, is it today? Who else is there?” And Bob said, “Every f***er in music is here but you. Get up and get on a plane and get here!” And George did. He turned up at 7 or 8 o’clock at night, and walked straight in and sang his vocal brilliantly.

So, who sang first?

You’ve got to remember that all these people turned up not having heard one note of the song. It wasn’t like these days, where you’d be able to email someone the track and they’d be able to listen to it in advance. So there was no vying for first position. Nobody wanted to go first, which was totally understandable; they were about to sing a song they didn’t know in front of all their peers, and they’ve got a film camera in front of them. It’s the worst possible scenario for any musician. Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet was the first person to get up there and do his thing, and he did it brilliantly and that broke the ice. After that, it was easy.

Were there any ego battles over who got to sing what?

As I said, not a lot of this was planned. We hadn’t even thought who was going to sing each line! There weren’t even enough lines in the song for all the vocalists to have a go. I mean, I don’t have a line, and neither does Bob. It was more important getting really distinctive global voices on there. Paul Young was huge at the time, George was huge, Sting was huge. Interestingly enough, the guy who kind of stole the moment was Bono, who was at that time still kind of a college-rock artist; U2 hadn’t really attained the massive heights they were going to eventually attain. Bono came in and just went for it. When I assigned that original line on the guide vocal, it was an octave lower. It was almost a throwaway line. And he just jumped the octave and belted this thing out. It was incredible. It was a serious turning point in the record. When he did that, it kicked the song off. It went into another gear at that point.

So, there were no ego clashes? Everyone got along?

I think initially it was a little awkward, because there’d be people there that had slighted other artists in various interviews, ripping someone else’s record to shreds a couple weeks before in NME or something. But you get over that; it’s not a reason to sulk in the corner or not talk to anyone. It was actually a very jovial atmosphere in the studio. I think the really great thing was there was no record company behind us; there was no label, no management, no one was laying on drinks, no one was laying on food. If you wanted a sandwich, you had to go to the shop ’round the corner and go buy one. Boy George came in after flying in on the Concorde and kind of snapped his fingers and said, “Someone get me a brandy!” And I pressed the button on the intercom and said, “You’ll have to get it yourself, there’s no flunkies here!”

Was there a lot of partying going on in the studio?

I think there was some shenanigans going on with, I think, Status Quo and Duran Duran, and possibly some forms of illicit substances flying around. But I was sitting behind a mixing desk for 24 hours, so I didn’t really get a chance to indulge in anything other than sitting there, making a record. By 8 o’clock Sunday evening we had to throw everyone out because we had to start mixing the record; it had to be in the pressing plant the next morning, otherwise we’d not get the thing finished and in the stores for Christmas. So we had to throw everyone out, and no one wanted to leave! All these rich, famous rock stars, all in one of the most vibrant cities in the world, and they didn’t want to go anywhere! They were having such a good time just hanging out, just being part of this thing. It was quite incredible.

How did you become involved with Band Aid in the first place?

I think like most things, there was no real plan. I happened to be in the right place, or the wrong place, at the right time. I was doing a TV show in the north of England which [Bob Geldof’s] girlfriend at the time, Paula Yates, co-hosted, when Bob called Paula. He said, “Let me speak to Midge,” and he told me about the footage he’d just seen on BBC News about the famine in Ethiopia. He said how disgusted he was and he wanted to do something, but didn’t know what. … We came up with the obvious conclusion that the only thing we were kind of semicapable of doing was writing a song. So Bob had half an idea kicking around; I went home and worked on another idea, and then proceeded to spend the next three or four days trying to put these totally incompatible ideas together.

Bob Geldof and Midge Ure outside SARM Studios during the recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (Photo: Larry Ellis/Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

You really wrote the song that quickly?

Yeah, three or four days. I sent Bob a cassette of me playing on a little Casio keyboard. He hated it! Then he came to my house with a guitar; he plays a right-handed guitar, but left-handed, so he played this thing upside-down, and it was missing a lot of strings as well. He sang what he had, and every time he sang it, it was different. So he was obviously just kind of shooting from the hip. I recorded his part on a cassette and started gluing these ideas together in my studio, trying to do some kind of arrangement on this very, very shaky idea.

I think the part people most remember from that song is the “Feed the World” refrain…

Well, that was the last thing to come, believe it or not! That was the last thing we did. If you listen to the song, it’s a song with no real pop sensibilities. There’s no real structure to it. Most songs have an intro and a verse and then a chorus, but this is just a thing that started and kind of grew. It didn’t really have anything you could sing along with. It was very obvious to Bob and I that it needed something at the end, so between the two of us we came up with the “Feed the World” hook. It’s a very strange thing, putting a hook of a song at the very end. In many ways it was such an alien, unusual arrangement. I do still think to this day that having all these artists added strength to the record. It otherwise would have been a dreadful flop as a commercial record. It wasn’t overtly commercial.

Is it true that you played almost all of the instruments on the song?

Yes, all of them, except for Phil Collins’s drums.

But we see people like John Taylor of Duran Duran playing bass in the music video…

Kind of, yeah. John played the bass, but it just didn’t sound right playing an electric bass amongst all this electronic stuff. So John put a bassline down, but it’s mixed way, way, way quiet. A few other people put guitars down as well, which again we just decided not to use, because it just kind of jarred against the version that we had. I spent four days in my studio doing all the instruments, so everything we had on the record except the vocals and Phil’s drums are mine.

I know Tears for Fears didn’t participate in the recording session itself, but isn’t there a Tears for Fears sample on there?

Yeah, there is! I didn’t ask them, I just did it! Samples were quite new at the time, and I was a big Tears for Fears fan. I thought their productions were wonderful — great songwriters, great band. I lifted the drum sound at the beginning of “The Hurting” because there’s one single tom sound, and I sampled that tom and started layering it up and playing drum patterns with it, and mixed it in with all my multitrack vocals at the front of the record, so it was drones and noises and things — a mixture of Tears for Fears’ drums and my voice.

Were they upset about this?

Weirdly enough, when they found out about it, I think they were actually quite pleased to learn they had contributed to the record, even though they didn’t know much about it at the time. I think they felt quite pleased that something of theirs was on it.

Would you say “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was your career highlight?

Well, I think it was very much a product of the arrangement at the time, very much a product of something that Bob and I put together as a one-off. We’ve never written together since, and I can’t imagine we’ll ever write together again. We’re very, very different musical characters as well as emotional characters. … People always ask me what the highlights of my career are, and they always expect me to say Band Aid. I say, well, it’s not necessarily my career highlight, but it was a highlight in my life. None of this was done for favor, none of this was done to get a pat on the back, none of this was done to get a knighthood. It was done in a very basic way, on gut instinct, as an absolute reaction to something that shouldn’t have been happening in our world at the time. I happened to be there and luckily, because Bob and I are chalk and cheese, we managed to pull this thing off. I’ll just say it was quite a magnificent thing. And who would have thought, 30 years later, it would still be getting played — and that it might still be getting played 30 more years down the line?

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Fantasia (Photo: Rock Soul Entertainment)

American Idol Season 3 champion Fantasia’s life struggles have been well documented — in her memoir and accompanying TV biopic Life Is Not a Fairytale, for starters, as well as in her VH1 reality show Fantasia for Real, which chronicled her recovery from a 2010 breakdown and overdose. But through it all, Fantasia’s grandmother, Addie Collins, was always there for her, reminding the girl she lovingly nicknamed “Tasia” of the importance of family — especially during the holiday season.

“My grandmother, pretty lady she was, and she was my biggest fan,” Fantasia reminisces to Yahoo Entertainment. “She played a big role in my life, from when I was a little girl to winning Idol. She was that woman that I would call whenever I was going through so much, when people was talking about me. She had all the right words, all the right things to say. … She would always say, ‘If you fail, get back up again. Brush yourself off. No matter what you did, God will forgive you. You forgive yourself, and you keep it moving.’ It was those talks, those moments on the phone, that kept me going and kept me inspired. I have to think of those, to this day, because I can’t pick up the phone and call her. I can’t hear her voice now. But what I do have is the memories, and I can still hear her saying to me, ‘Keep going. Anything worth having is worth fighting for.’”Fantasia gave birth to her second child in 2011 and married businessman Kendall Taylor in 2015, and she became a (step)grandmother herself last year when Kendall’s son from a previous relationship became a dad. But sadly, Collins — whose birthday was actually Christmas Day — died two and a half years ago, making the holiday season bittersweet for the settled-down Fantasia and her growing family. (“I don’t think it will ever get easy,” she admits.) However, the 33-year-old singer has found the best way to honor her grandmother this season: with a new holiday album, Christmas After Midnight.

“My grandmother always played music during the holidays, all day long, all day long,” Fantasia remembers fondly. “It was the Temptations’ ‘Silent Night’ [which Fantasia covers on her holiday album], or the Jackson 5’s Christmas album, or the Mariah Carey album. She made sure there was always music playing through the house, keeping that Christmas spirit going. That is what I wanted to do with this album, and to go back in time. I’ve dedicated this album to her, and I prayed over this album. I said, ‘With this album, let families come back together again, because they’re breaking up.’”

Fantasia elaborates on that last thought: “When we lose the grandma, when we lose the grandpa, we lose the family. We lose the love. That’s what I wanted this album to do, with me also stepping outside of the box and singing the songs that I know she loved: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Ray Charles, all those people who came before us. Those people who were really singing about something. Singing about love. That’s why I dedicated it to my grandma, and that’s why she was so special to me, because she left me with something. That’s what we need more now in this world, in this day and time. We need men and women to stand up and lead our young people, and leave them with something, leave them inspired, leave them encouraged — because they’re not right now.”

The jazzy-but-genre-hopping album, which was produced by Ron Fair (“He’s an amazing producer, a genius”) at L.A.’s Capitol Studios and Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, is Fantasia’s first release on her own Concord Records-distributed imprint, Rock Soul Entertainment. It features a mix of favorites, including unexpected covers of James Brown’s “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and Fantasia explains, “I started in gospel, but when you love music, you don’t put a label on music. That’s why I like to call what we do now ‘rock soul,’ meaning you love all genres of music, all different sounds. I don’t want to be boxed in. [In the studio] I was saying, ‘Musicians, don’t box yourselves in, either! I want you to play from your spirit, and play what you hear. Play from your soul.’ Everything that you hear, on this album, when it comes down to the music and the way I sing it and arranged it, vocally, it’s all coming from a passionate place, a loving place.”

“Hallelujah” is an interesting choice, not just because it’s not a holiday song per se, but because it has been covered so many times — and by so many American Idol contestants! — that it’s almost impossible for any singer to switch it up and make it fresh. Fantasia, however, was up for the challenge.

“We played ‘Hallelujah’ totally different,” she says of the stunning track. “I’ve listened to ‘Hallelujahs’ several times, with different people, and I loved it, but I wanted to do my own. When we started recording it, I said, ‘No, no, no.’ We stopped. I didn’t enjoy how we were doing it the first time. I said, ‘We can’t do it the same way everybody’s been doing it. I want the guitar player to just give me something bluesy, give me something moody. When you hear this song, what do you feel?’ And we just stripped it down, and he made it a different song — Fantasia’s version. That’s what made me so excited. I remember, I think I cried that day in the studio because there was something about the guitar player’s licks and his mood and the words to the song that made me very emotional. I think that’s what makes the song so freaking dope.”

Fantasia is on the road with her “Christmas After Midnight — A Holiday Concert” tour through Dec. 14, and she feels that excitement and emotion every time she hits the stage. “It’s a rush. I don’t need any alcohol. I don’t need any drugs. I’m getting all my high from music.” She also feels gratitude, taking inspiration from how much her late grandmother appreciated the little joys in life.

“She would ask me for the simplest things. I brought her to stay with me in New York for a while. I wanted her to see me in my last Broadway show, which was called After Midnight [which inspired Christmas After Midnight]. I said, ‘Grandma, what store do you want to go to? I’m going to get you whatever you want.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Tasia, I want you to take me to the thrift store.’ I’m like, ‘Grandma, we’re in New York City, and you want to go to the thrift store?’ But that is what I loved about her.

“And that’s how I appreciate and look at life now. Because when I went through all those bad times, and then I lost everything,” continues Fantasia (whose past money woes have included a 2013 battle to avoid foreclosure on her North Carolina home), “now I look at life, and I’m like, it’s not about the cars we drive. It’s not about always wearing labels. It’s not about staying in the hotels that cost this much money. No, it’s about getting up in the morning, and just listening to the birds chirp. Just being able to have the ability to hear. Just being able to have the ability to live to see another day, because some people do not do that. As I watch my little brother [Xavier Barrino], who’s 24 years old and in the hospital from a motorcycle accident right now… he still can’t walk, but I watched him go from not being able to talk and not being able to eat, to now, he can talk and he can eat.

“It’s those moments that my grandmother used to try to remind us of: ‘Don’t worry about that. Just understand that you’re still here. The Lord allows you to see another day to make a difference, and to just be a blessing to somebody.’ She made herself a gift to people, meaning she gave back to the community. She made sure people had clothes, socks, shoes, and food on their table, and if they needed help paying their rent, she did that too. She would even invite people into our home. I see the same things with me; I try not to give so much of myself away that I forget about myself, but I did want to keep that tradition going, by giving back to the world my music. That’s what I loved about my grandma, and I thank her. I do. I thank her for giving me that.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Gwen Stefani (Photo: Business Wire)

Two and half years ago, in August 2015, Gwen Stefani was in a dark place, as her 13-year marriage to the father of her three children, Gavin Rossdale, whom she’d been with since 1995, came to a shocking end. However, by Thanksgiving of that same year, she was in a blissful new relationship with her Voice co-star, Blake Shelton, aka People’s reigning Sexiest Man Alive, who had just split from his wife of four years, Miranda Lambert. And seemingly against all odds, “Shefani” are still going strong.

Spending their third holiday season together, the couple’s celebration plans this year include Thanksgiving weekend at Shelton’s Oklahoma ranch, Christmas in Los Angeles, and, of course, a feel-good duet on the title track of Stefani’s new holiday album, You Make It Feel Like Christmas. Shelton will also appear on Stefani’s holiday special, airing Dec. 12 on NBC.

One might wonder how Stefani maintains her steadfast, starry-eyed belief in romance after two very public back-to-back breakups (her previous long-term relationship, with No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, inspired much of that band’s landmark album Tragic Kingdom). Stefani tells Yahoo Entertainment she “wasn’t even looking [for love] or trying or anything” back in 2015, and admits that when she first started dating Shelton, “I know everybody was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was the same way! But it just happened, and I just took it.”

Stefani credits her religious faith and a recent spiritual rebirth for allowing her to love again. “At the time when it was going down, never in my wildest dreams would I ever imagine the miracle that happened to me,” she says. “Some people don’t like to hear this, but for me it was a spiritual intervention. It was a true miracle. I think the only way I got through all the hard times is just my spiritual faith and my belief in God, because I’ve just seen the miracles around me.

“I know it makes people uncomfortable to talk about it, but we are at Christmas, a spiritual time, and I am proof of those things,” she continues. “Honestly, that’s just how I got through it and how I got to this place and recognized the gift that was given to me: a new friendship. My No. 1 thing in my life is my faith and everything else falls after that, and I just always have been constantly asking for guidance. That’s all I care about. Everything else is underneath that. [Shelton] was just one of the gifts that I was given. And I’m so very, very, very grateful.”

Stefani may be religious offstage, but on You Make It Feel Like Christmas she sticks with mostly lighthearted, secular holiday fare like “Santa Baby,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Let It Snow,” along with some Blake-inspired originals. “I’m not a choir singer! I never pretend to be anything more than what I am,” she chuckles.

However, You Make It Feel Like Christmas does include some serious moments — like a recording of “Silent Night,” one of Stefani’s sons’ favorite songs (“I’ve sung that to my children their whole life, even when it’s not Christmas, because for some reason it’s such a good lullaby”), and a cover of Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” a modern-day carol that has taken on sad new meaning since George Michael passed away literally last Christmas, on Dec. 25, 2016.

“I am a child of the ’80s,” Stefani says proudly, “and that is one of my favorite Christmas songs. … I didn’t really do it for any other reason except I love that song so much, but when we were about to do it, I started to realize how actually big it was to be doing it right now, and that I did need to get it right. That was one of the ones where I was like, ‘Wow, how are we going to flip this?’ I think the hardest thing to do when you’re doing covers is to make it your own, and also not disrespect or offend the original. I’m proud of [my version], and it’s also my favorite one to do live. I was so scared to learn it, because the way the song is written, it almost sounds like George was writing a bunch of ad-libs; the melody’s pretty hard and complicated. It really is just a magical song, and I think it turned out so good. I would hope that George would love it.”

As for this Christmas, last year Stefani and Shelton made homemade gnocchi, manicotti, and Stefani’s grandmother’s lasagna (“We just cooked and cooked and cooked!”), and this year, Stefani says, “My holiday challenge will be, if I can do it, gingerbread.” Stefani says “tradition is really important” to her, but says her favorite new holiday tradition is just getting to spend the season with her new love on his home turf.

“I think really for our whole family, that’s a new tradition right there, just the experience of Oklahoma and the middle of America. It’s just that cultural collision [between Oklahoma and Stefani’s Southern California] that I love. I’m such a huge fan of cultures and learning their traditions and combining them with what we’re doing. It’s cute.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.