Track-By-Track: Family Force 5
The members of FAMILY FORCE 5 walk us through each song on Family Force 5’s Christmas Pageant.
Carol Of The Bells – Family Force 5
Solomon “Soul Glow Activatur” Olds (vocals/guitar): “This was the first track that we recorded for the album and it was a lot of fun. The beats we used are very dramatic with the strings, and we just wanted to make it very thug-sounding. Once we had the beat, we started tracking drums, and then we started to have trouble making an epic chorus, so we kept playing around with different ideas. I tried to sing the song but it didn’t have right feel, so I made Crouton [Jacob Olds, drums] sing it. He had to squat low to the floor when he sang the song to make it extra ghetto! He kept bouncing and saying stupid things that never made it to the track, but it kept the spirit of Christmas in the air. I sing the infamous ‘ding dong’ bell part in the song and Crouton supports with the vocal line, ‘Ya’ll give ’em a break. He’s talking ’bout bells.’ That had us rolling on the floor laughing for about two hours.”
Little Drummer Boy – Family Force 5
Jacob “Crouton” Olds (drums): “We knew I’d get to sing this one because I play the drums, so I’m the little drummer boy. I play my drums. Pa-rum pa-pum-pum.”
Derek “Chap Stique” Mount (guitar): “But we changed the lyric to ‘drum machine’ instead of ‘drum,’ so I guess we should’ve had Nadaddy [Nathan Currin] sing it. He plays our 800-pound drum machine.
Crouton: Nope. It’s my song.
Soul Glow Activatur: “It took Nadaddy forever to learn this on synthesizer, so we almost didn’t play it. We should have had him play the drum machine instead.”
Crouton: “I did think it was cool that I sang so smoothly and cool while saying, ‘The lamb and ox kept time.’ We wanted to sing, ‘The lamb and ox did beats,’ but we would’ve run into copyright issues.”
Chap Stique: “For some reason, we were allowed to change ‘drum’ to ‘drum machine’ without any copyright issues, but I guess they get pretty strict when you mess with the ox and the lamb.”
Soul Glow Activatur: “I stayed up for two days straight trying to program this thing when we were in the middle of Texas. I wanted to pay homage to the Jackson 5 version of this song, so I listened to it a lot. This is the version that the Jackson 5 should’ve done. This is also the only all-falsetto FF5 song in existence.”
Christmas Time Is Here – Family Force 5
Crouton: “The Vince Guaraldi version of this is probably my favorite Christmas song of all time.”
Chap Stique: “Yeah, it’s definitely a good one. It’s one of the happiest depressing songs I’ve ever heard.”
Soul Glow Activatur: “We loved how chill it was, so we asked Nico [Hartikainen] from Danger Radio to put together a track for us. He killed it, so Crouton and I played some pots and pans to give it a bit of a kitchen vibe.”
Chap Stique: “We always go back to the kitchen vibe, because that’s where we all get fed.”
Soul Glow Activatur: “Then, we added some drums and party sounds and turned it into a party. We set up a couple of mics and invited our friends to have a Christmas party in the middle of May.”
Crouton: “ I remember us trying to reenact a bad office Christmas party. I yelled, ‘I’m engaged,’ ‘Did she say that to you? I can’t believe she said that to you,’ and, ‘Buy Dance Or Die, it’s the greatest album ever!,’ in the background.”
Chap Stique: “You can hear all that stuff if you listen closely enough. There are a bunch of subliminal messages like The Dark Side Of Oz or something.”
Crouton: “We had a Charlie Brown Christmas tree set up in the middle of the whole party. Nadaddy sat in the corner wearing a kitchen pan on his head.”
Soul Glow Activatur: “We passed around some eggnog. This is the track with the most glee on the album.”
My Favorite Things – Family Force 5
Crouton: “I remember talking to Soul Glow about maybe doing ‘Favorite Things’ even though it’s not a standard Christmas song.”
Chap Stique: “It’s totally not a Christmas song.”
Crouton: “Yeah it is. Luther Vandross sang it on his Christmas album.”
Chap Stique: “Really? I thought you were going to pull the Barbara Streisand card. But I never realized Luther did it too. Dang. Some days never change.”
Crouton: “You just stole my line. And, yes, I totally pulled the Luther card on you. My mom killed his Christmas record while we were growing up.”
Chap Stique: “I’ve been had! I should’ve known. This song’s so gangster it’s ridiculous. ‘Snowflakes on eyelashes,’ ‘whiskers on kittens’–you know, all that gangster stuff. I guess that’s why we put a gangster guitar solo on it.”
Crouton: “No doubt. No doubt.”
Chap Stique: “That still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a Christmas song.”
Angels We Have Heard On High – Family Force 5
Soul Glow Activatur: “One of the reasons this song made it to the album is because it’s public domain. We picked it so we could avoid copyright issues.”
Chap Stique: “I was recording guitars for ‘Keep the Party Alive’ with my good friend [and Katy Perry guitarist] Matt Beckley. He’s an incredible producer who we met on Warped Tour a few summers ago, and he’s filled in for me a couple times when I’ve had to miss shows. Soul Glow called and asked if we could lay down some extra parts for ‘Angels.’ We opened up the vocal tracks and cracked up when we heard the [Michael Jackson song] ‘P.Y.T.’-sounding effect on ‘in excelsis deo.’ We busted out the baritone guitar and recorded the chorus guitars in about five minutes. We then spent several hours coming up with jazzy, weird licks to go in the verses. Matt was borrowing some pedals from a friend, so we put all kinds of trippy, ethereal swells and sounds on the verses. I left the session and called Soul Glow saying, ‘We’ll probably need to throw a few more guitars on the chorus, but the verses are solid!’ Ironically, all the choruses in the final mix are exactly as we had left them, but every jazzy verse guitar part was removed!”
Soul Glow Activatur: “I don’t like jazz.”
Chap Stique: “Maybe jazz doesn’t like you.”
Do You Hear What I Hear – Family Force 5
Chap Stique: “We were in a cab going to the airport after a one-off show last winter when Soul Glow played me a loop for this song, and I thought it was incredible. It had this droning, [U2’s] ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’ vibe, and I really liked it.”
Crouton: “When the song was still in its rough stages, Soul Glow asked if I would go and lay down some drums. I hopped on the kit. We had been working on ‘Angels’ all night, and we were about to go home, but the drums sounded so monstrous in this song that we decided to stay all night to work on them.”
Chap Stique: “I was in L.A. at the time, and Soul Glow e-mailed me an MP3 the next day. The second I heard those drums, I was blown away. I thought, ‘Crouton’s the new John Bonham!’”
Nadaddy (keys): “It sounds even bigger live.”
Chap Stique: “The coolest thing about this song is the fact that we found a puppeteer in Atlanta and asked him to make two hats with giant ears on them to emphasize the ‘hear’ in the line, ‘Do you hear what I hear?’ When we play this song live, two of our crew members wear the hats and perform a choreographed dance. The ears are modeled after Fatty’s, and they’re made to scale.”
Twas The Night Before Christmas – Family Force 5
Soul Glow Activatur: “We needed one more track for the album and had a hard time picking out a song that we liked cause we don’t like a ton of Christmas tunes. Crouton was kidding around and came up with the idea that our roadie Xanadu should sing or recite, ‘’Twas The Night Before Christmas.’ He’s got the weirdest German-Asian-British accent you’ve ever heard, and it’s amazing. I popped up a beat I had laying around and the beat had a fun synth sound on it. The song had a very chill vibe, like a Snoop Dogg track or something. So I started rhyming on it with the original poem lyrics in a chilled out sort of way and it sounded dope. We wanted to make the chorus fun, so we started raising our hands up while the beat played and sang, ‘On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer, on Vixen,’ and it just sounded magical. I got my wife, Lalipop, to sing on it and that made it sound super gangsta! It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.”
Its Christmas Day – Family Force 5
Soul Glow Activatur: “We needed a slow song for the record, so I had a friend of mine named Mac Powell [from Third Day] help me write the song. It has this cool little swing to it and a guitar line that sounded very Christmas-like. The lyrics tell the story of how you feel right when you wake up on Christmas Day. I think most people love that feeling, so we wanted to capture it in a song. I got my father, Jerome Olds, to sing on it with me, and I thought he sounded amazing. Plus it added a very ‘family’ feel to it because that’s what Christmas feels like to me. We had a guy named John Painter from a band called Fleming And John arrange some strings, and that took it to the Winter Wonderland status!”
The Baby – Family Force 5
Chap Stique: “Every now and again, Soul Glow records his baby, Cash, being cute. Then he chops up the audio and video and creates masterpieces that will make Cash hate us when he’s 13. One beat was particularly good, so we decided to write a song around it. The five of us were in a dressing room in New Hampshire laughing about our friend Black Diamond, who often shuffles dollar bills in the air during dance parties in an attempt to ‘make it rain.’ There’s something hilarious to us about ‘making it rain,’ so we decided to write a song from the perspective of the magi, saying that we’d make it rain frankincense, gold, and myrrh on the baby Jesus. Traditionally, we’re painfully slow lyric writers, but this song came to us pretty quickly. We didn’t have enough time to get into a studio to record this song, so Soul Glow did the vocals in a little shack in the woods in Holland right before we went on stage. Plenty of Dutchmen knocked on our door asking why somebody was repeatedly yelling, ‘Gifts, presents, make it rain all night on the baby.’ I guess it means something different in Dutch.
Wonderful Christmas Time – Family Force 5
Soul Glow Activatur: “All of us brothers have always loved Sir Paul McCartney’s original version of this song, and it’s still hard to beat. It’s Fatty’s favorite Christmas song ever.”
Chap Stique: “Our friend Alan–who also added some Neverending Story-esque keys to Dance Or Die–worked some magic on this track to give it a futuristic, yet nostalgic vibe.”
Crouton: “We recorded the vocals in the back lounge of the bus in July. At this point, we were running out of time, and we were close to missing our deadline. We started recording vocals at 8 a.m., and we woke everybody up. Nadaddy was angry, so we asked him if he wanted to sing it.”
Soul Glow Activatur: “Yeah, we called him a Grinch.”
Chap Stique: “But then his heart grew 10 sizes that day, so he picked up a giant sled that was dangling from a cliff and gave us gifts.”
Crouton: “Secretly, I wanted to sing this song. I thought Soul Glow was going to do it, but he asked me to sing it, and it was a tremendous honor to me.”
Chap Stique: “Yeah, singing anything that was originally sung by a knight is an honor.” alt
