Having perceived, like many, a sad lack in recent decades of memorable Christmas songs in general and the jazzy, swing-band, easy-singing kind of Christmas songs in particular, Jimmy Mallia offers “All I Want for Christmas.”
It’s just the thing to fill the void — a jazzy, swinging, fun kind of Christmas song rendered in Jimmy’s unique burr-oak bass voice.
“The guy I play guitar with, we’ve joked through the years that, in our opinion” — emphasis on “in our opinion” — there hasn’t been any new Christmas stuff out since Mariah Carey’s hit.”
That would be 1994 and her “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
“And I really wanted to do a Christmas song, so, I wrote this song about my daughters.”
Santa, all I want for Christmas is my girls
Santa, all I ever wanted is my girls
Santa to make Christmas complete
The gift I always wanted is my girls
A slow, soft guitar intro with brushed cymbals, a little piano and, of course, sleigh bells evoke the Christmas songs of Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin and others from earlier generations.
“It’s really about my daughters,” said Jimmy, who has three. “But as I was writing it, inside my head all I kept hearing was kind of the old-time Christmas songs, and I very much borrowed from that. I was pretty pleased with the way it came out. It needed a lot of instruments because you can’t — in my opinion — have a Christmas song without bells and all that.”
The song has a genuine throwback vibe that evokes a Christmas morning around a glittering tree, like a movie featuring Bing or Jimmy Stewart.
“Still,” he said, “I don’t think I can do anything that doesn’t have kind of a country or folk bent, but it has that old-time shade to it. It was a whole lot of fun to compose, where I go, ‘Okay, I know I want to hear this sound here, and I want to do this.’ That was a lot of fun.”
“All I Want for Christmas” is the seventh song that Jimmy, at age 60, has put out. His music career is budding out from his long-time career in finance. He has been writing music for 16 years, more as a hobby than anything else, “just for me,” he said.
If he had any professional hopes, it was that perhaps other artists would pick up his songs and play them. But writing songs and working them into shape involves singing them. At the urging of friends, he started recording and publishing them late last year. The objective was more or less just to see where they would go.
His music has been well received, upwards of half a million streams across various platforms.
“I’m doing it at 60 years old, and I thought, ‘Well, I wonder if it would take off,’ because that’s something that most people think about in their teens, in their 20s, such a bold adventure as this. I hope it works out, because I really would like to show that it doesn’t matter at what age you start, you’re never too old to chase that dream.”
He has loosely gathered some musicians in working up to live performances, but the process is much more time consuming that he imagined. He does want to get out in front of people, though.
“I feel fairly confident that I won’t, hopefully, get booed off the stage. So, that’s the start.”
The stage sets will include originals and covers of “songs that are really meaningful to me.” Many of them are on his TikTok page.
In the meantime, he will put out more singles. The next one, coming right after the New Year, is called “They Say I Only Sing Sad Songs.” He wrote that one a long time ago, he said,
Fun is a hallmark of Jimmy’s music, even the songs that come out of his alcoholism (he has been sober for more than three years now).
“They Say,” he said, is a fun, rowdy, “kind of raunchy” song with “a great beat.”
“I went on a bender for a while where it seemed like every song I wrote was a sad song. So, I’m kind of making fun of myself, and country music in general. There’s a line in there that says, ‘I’m loving life, my life’ and then it goes on to say, ‘so fuh fuh fuh fuh forget you.’ It’ll definitely get people on their feet.”
Now, at Christmas 2024, he has a Christmas song.
“It’s an original with a throwback feel to it, kind of reminiscing, bringing back memories, but Christmas really is, you know, just give me my family, and I’m good.”
He wants people to listen to it all the way up to Christmas and maybe even beyond.
“And then I put a new one out.”
Swing into Christmas with Jimmy Mallia and connect with him on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
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