Welcome to Merry Fucking Christmas 2015. I wish a merry fucking Christmas to you and yours.

Hi, I’m Chris Boudreau. I make music under the moniker of Castles Full of Vassals. I work with my compatriot Peter Brown on various music projects as well. He operates under the moniker of The Peter Broudge Project.

We’ve been friends for an obscene amount of time, all the way back to the salad days of youth. Back then we didn’t have much money because we didn’t have steady jobs. We were kids after all. So when Christmas time came around, we were hard pressed to gift-give efficiently. Pete came up with a fantastic solution to this monetary deprivation. It wasn’t an original idea really, it has been done many times. It was a mixtape. Or a mix-CD, to be more precise.

CD-Rs were cheap, as were their jewel cases. He had MS paint and a printer, so the cover art was… covered. And we were music nerds that were listening to new shit all the time, so we had strong tastes and opinions regarding what “you” should be listening to right “now”. So he filled out CD track lists with MP3s of (possible) dubious origin, burned them, called it Merry Fucking Christmas, and handed them out. It was a best-of-the-year mixtape.

What started as a cheap gift soon became a personal favorite gift. It became a little bit like a tradition. I always looked forward to getting the new Merry Fucking Christmas and playing out the best songs of the year in my car.

The time in which this was happening is important. This was a time where MP3s were still becoming the standard listening format. Listening to streaming music wasn’t really a thing yet. Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp didn’t exist yet. And Youtube was only used for cat videos. Also, smartphones were only in their inception. Getting a CD with music picked across a large variety of music was a huge convenience.

Eventually though, technology outpaced the “special-ness” of getting a mixtape at the end of the year. It became more reasonable and practical to just make a playlist on Spotify or Youtube and send it around through Facebook. Pete and I tried to revive the tradition in 2010 by gathering a bunch of songs and sending them to select friends through [REDACTED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN], which was a file sharing site. It was fun, but it didn’t have the same impact
So I had an idea about a year ago. We can’t send around files of songs legally, and people don’t really listen to CDs that much anymore, or have much interest in mixtapes. How do we keep this little tradition alive and relevant?

Covers! We’ll do cover songs. We have a bunch of musician friends, and this might be a fun way to display their talent. Makes (a bit of) sense right?

So that’s what this is. We gathered some friends and said “cover some songs you like”. So it’s a cover mixtape. And hopefully it’s the first of many. I’d like to make this a yearly tradition.

So from ours to yours, have a merry fucking Christmas and a happy goddamed holidays.