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Thank you. Received the CD in the mail so fast I didn't have time to question the shipping date. My daughter loves John Fahey guitar. She grew up with his music and was thrilled to get this CD before Christmas so she could fill her home with the same music she grew up with.
There's an intimacy to Fahey's music that befits the holiday season. If you have found some of Fahey's secular music inaccessible, this is certainly not the case with his Christmas music.
Throw another log on the fire, pour yourself an egg nog and enjoy. This hour-long album is as important as Phil Spector's or Elvis Presley's or Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas albums.
Of the more than six thousand titles in my music collection, more than two hundred of them are Christmas albums. On about half of the tracks Fahey is accompanied by cello ("Angels from the Realms of Glory," "Good Christian Men Rejoice"), piano ("Spanish Carol) and/or flute ("Christ Is Born as Child of Man," "Lo How a Rose E'er Blooming") to wonderful effect.
ESSENTIAL And starting the week of Thanksgiving, The John Fahey Christmas Album spends more time in my CD player than most of them.
Whether it's the solemn beauty of "Silent Night" or the gaiety of "Jingle Bells," Fahey's playing is mesmermizing.
(The silence was finally broken by the dark gratings and howlings of "City of Refuge" which includes a ghastly 15 minute noise sequence called "On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age"). The latest in a series of Christmas John Fahey albums, and perhaps the prettiest, with flute, piano and cello arrangements gracing some less obvious Xmas pieces - this is Fahey at his most New Age. The somewhat mechanical syncopation of previous Christmas outings is abandoned for a kind of crystalline purity of melody which represents, in its way, one of Fahey's most extreme statements (as "City of Refuge" represents another). But as Fahey's Xmas albums go, this is probably the best. Enjoying its lambent simplicity, the listener would never realise that this is an album made by a man on a kind of precipice. Fahey was being gradually overwhelmed by various health and financial problems, and after this album nothing was heard from him for five years.
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