The 25 days of Christmas: Day 6

A deep cut from an elusive band today.

Back in 2001 or so, I was watching some late night talk show and they had on a band called The Incredible Moses Leroy. Obviously that’s the greatest possible name for a band, and the song they played, called “1983,” took my breath away. I bought the CD, Electric Pocket Radio, and listened to it obsessively for months.

Back in those days the Internet wasn’t yet a source of exhaustive information about everything, and the band was maddeningly hard to track down. They had no web site, and all I was really able to learn was that the singer, Ron Fountenberry, had named the band after his grandfather and that they were based in San Diego. (Later I would learn that a friend of a friend had been his college roommate.)

I waited and waited for another album to come out, but none ever did. Some years later I happened to learn that the reason was they’d changed their name—they were now called Softlightes, and had put out two more albums. Once again I was obsessed, particularly with the album Say No to Being Cool Say Yes to Being Happy.

In 2007 they put out a single called “The Last Christmas on Earth”:

I just love this song. It encapsulates their sound so perfectly: the opening mandolin evoking snow, Fountenberry’s voice that always surprises with its sweetness, the evocative interplay between the melody and chords, the chorus of joy in the face of despair, and perhaps most of all, the many combined voices on the chorus. The sound of a large group of people singing together speaks to something primal in our pack-animal brains, and the song taps into that power beautifully.

And the lyrics drive home the awe that grips me around this time every year (more on this to come later):

We can dance
Dance because it's Christmas
'Cause this could be our last Christmas on Earth

As near as I can tell, Softlightes isn’t together anymore. Fountenberry founded a company that does musical scoring for films and TV. (They also list Lando Calrissian as an employee on their web site.) The band is one of those rare little gems that never really found a broad audience but instead created their own insular, beautiful little world. They're everywhere, if you look.