Hawk Nelson: I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day

I hope you weren’t looking for me yesterday, as I decided to take the day off from the blog. While I didn’t actually work on it, I was thinking about some changes for 2011. One of the changes will be a set theme for Wednesday as “One Hit Wonder Wednesday.” Numerous bands hit the charts will only one hit record – they need to be remembered before fading into oblivion.

Friday Firsts is one of my favorite features, but I need to freshen up the blog somewhat and there are an entire group of songs that one does not find fitting some of the other categories. These songs are being missed as they are flip sides of popular records.

Friday Flipsides will begin the first week in January and will feature tunes that were relegated to the other side of the record. Some will be familiar and some will not. In some cases, the “B” side became the hit song and in other cases the single was a double sided hit record. That is inconsequential as I’ll feature the flip – well known or not.

Saturday’s album feature, while I will bring it back from time to time, will be temporarily retired as it really requires a great deal of time and effort on my part to find the music. I am toying with an idea of featuring songs that did not make it in to the Top 40 charts, but rather were records that were bubbling under the Top 40 or perhaps an album cut the achieved its fame via AOR airplay.

While I've changed the blog in the past, I don’t think I’ve changed as many daily features at once. The other daily features (Spiritual Sundays, Monday Covers, Traditional Tuesdays, and TV Thursdays) will remain the same – but look for changes perhaps on some of these by summer 2011.

Now that we got some housekeeping out of the way, as the old Bugs Bunny cartoons used to sing: “On with the show this is it.” This week we will feature Christmas music through Saturday. I try to do a thematic set around holidays and of course Christmas has thousands of recordings from which to draw.

Today’s Spiritual Sunday Christmas song (that’s a mouthful) is by an alternative Christian band from Peterborough, Ontario. Peterborough is very close to Asphodel Township (same county) where my ancestors settled when coming to North America from the British Isles in 1820. The band is Hawk Nelson and today’s selection is a reworking of the Christmas classic “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” It is from their 2006 EP of Christmas music entitled “Gloria.”

There is an obvious mispronunciation in the second verse that drives me crazy. Lead singer Jason Dunn pronounces the word “Christendom” as “Christian-dom” rather than having the “T” silent as it is correctly pronounced as “krisən’dom.” I guess I can forgive them for this very minor indiscretion as it is a good rendition of this tune otherwise.