Béla Fleck: ‘Tis The Season

Especially for a seasonal album, Jingle All the Way marked an important transitional moment for Béla Fleck & The Flecktones. A mix of vividly re-imagined Christmas classics, inspired instrumental arrangements and top-shelf medleys, the 16-track 2008 set turned out to be the bluegrass-fusion combo’s final LP with saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who spent a portion of that year subbing for LeRoi Moore following an ATV accident and eventually joined Dave Matthews Band on more regular basis after the musician’s passing.

Jingle All the Way was also a truly cross-cultural affair, featuring Tuvan throat singers the Alash Ensemble, bassist Edgar Meyer and clarinetist/mandolinist Andy Statman, among others. Yet, despite its specific subject matter, the LP still feels like a natural extension of the The Flecktones’ signature approach. 

“We’re looking for things that are unusual but that sound like they were meant to go together,” Fleck says. “The success of a piece is that it doesn’t sound like anything that odd. You don’t even notice it.”

The Flecktones supported Jingle All the Way on stage shortly after its release but have veered in other directions since harmonica wiz/keyboardist Howard Levy, who was a member of the band from its formation in 1988 until 1993, rejoined in 2010. However, this holiday season, The Flecktones have been revisiting their Christmas material on the road during their current Jingle All The Way Tour—playing several cuts from the collection live for the first time in over 15 years. The run was originally supposed to feature a unique five-piece version of The Flecktones boasting both Coffin and Levy, but the latter musician was forced to pull out at the last minute for medical reasons. In his place, for much of the outing, rising mandolinist Sierra Hull has stepped in, rounding out an expansive cast of musicians that also includes the Alash Ensemble.

And Fleck, for one, has enjoyed putting together a more traditional “show” than The Flecktones are used to.

“If you’re touring for a shorter period, it’s nice to really refine it,” he says, the morning after The Flecktones headlined New York’s Beacon Theatre, where the banjo player once saw Return to Forever perform as a young music fan in the 1970s. “It’s the same thing when I played with Chick Corea because we didn’t tend to play for six months straight. We’d meet for two weeks, and then we’d meet a year later and do a week. So the setlist was very similar from night to night, but that didn’t stop us from being incredibly creative. So I’m comfortable with both. I’ve gotten a little less concerned with every set being different than I was 15 years ago.”

It’s been a number of years since The Flecktones’ released Jingle All the Way, which turned out to be the band’s final record with Jeff Coffin. Thinking back, do you remember the impetus for putting together a holiday album at that point in the group’s trajectory? 

Béla Fleck: I can’t exactly remember what jolted us to the point where we were actually willing to do it. It was an idea that was on the table for a while. It was one of those things where Future Man, Roy Wooten, would say something like, “Man, if we made a Christmas record, it would be all over.” [Laughs.]

A lot of times, I’m the last one to agree to an idea because I’m like, “Well, is it going to be lame?” I love a good Christmas album, like everybody else does, so my thought was, “Is there a way that we could do it where it would be really unusual and we could do something really different but that’s still very listenable,” which is what The Flecktones have always liked to do. We try to make a difficult concept still feel very “gettable.” That’s one of the things that we do well—we are good at using odd time signatures and selling complicated music as, “Hey, this is fun! Don’t worry, it’s not gonna hurt.”

Before we made the record, I remember we were on a European tour and, of course, this would have been in July because Christmas records have to be recorded during the summer in order to make it out by Christmas. We were on our way back from the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands and we in the airport throwing around ideas and singing Christmas tunes in odd meters—trying to figure out what fun things we could do. And the thing that got me over the hump was the idea that there were a lot of creative possibilities.

Then I started exploring this idea: “Since so many Christmas songs seem to have the same chord progression, I wonder is some of the melodies, since the chords are the same, might work on top of each other?” That led to this medley that we do where every single song is introduced and then played in counterpoint with another Christmas song that you’ve been hearing for your entire life.

So it was a really fun compositional challenge—figuring how can I get these things to work on top of each other. At first, I was the one sitting around with them. Eventually, we were all in rehearsals together trying different things, and we all came up with these ideas together, but I kind of had a master plan. I had these different ideas plugged into this notation program so that we could hear them back and try different pieces—just throw them up and see what worked. Sometimes you had to delay one of them a note or two, start it a couple of beats later and then, all of a sudden, this great harmony would emerge between the two melodies. So, at some point on that recording, there’s five or even six simultaneous Christmas tunes going on at the same time.

In addition to a few twists on the expected Christmas classics, you also included a few left-field seasonal choices on the record. Can you talk about how you landed on some of those selections?

BF: I thought it’d be really fun to find a Christmas cantata, a Bach piece that we could do. I knew that it would be a challenge for everybody to play it on instruments that a piece like that is not typically played on. It was also an excuse to invite Edgar Meyer to come and be a part of this. He’s my pal and my classical guru, so that was fun. Then it was a matter of searching through tons of Bach pieces until I heard one and went, “What if Edgar did the tenor part?” And that one was the right amount of challenge. It wasn’t an insane challenge, but it would take some work. We like to find something hard and battle it—get it to where it’s easy. [The selection was released as “J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: Ich Will Nur Zu Ehren Leben” on Jingle All The Way.”]

And then with Joni Michell’s “River,” the album it’s on, Blue, has been my companion ever since I was a teenager. I got it for my birthday, and I listened to it on repeat one summer—all summer long. I’d listen to side A all through July, and then we turned over the album in August and heard side B on repeat. Record players used to automatically repeat the album, so when we came to the end, we just played it out. 

I was out in East Hampton—or somewhere out there on Long Island—this one summer in particular. It was mostly me and my mom together in this little cabin, and we just had that record on all the time. So that record has been in my head my whole life, pretty much, and then I had the thought, “Well, that’s really a Christmas song. We should include it.” It’s about the sad feelings you can have during Christmas.

The fun part about that one was thinking, “How should we do that song?” Victor [Wooten] was already gonna do “The Christmas Song,” which is a fantastic bass arrangement he’s had forever, solo. So I said, “Well, to balance out the album, maybe I should do something solo, too.” Then I came up with this idea of playing piano and banjo at the same time, and I don’t play piano. So what I would do is set up the banjo mic, sit on the piano stool and put a brick on the hold pedal. Then I took masking tape and put it on all the bass keys, so I could see what note was what, and I would hit the bass note with my left hand and then play the melody for that section. Then, I’d hit the bass note with my left hand. It’s really hard to do because you have to hit the piano on the right key and get back to the fingerboard. And you have to do it all live and in real time. And so I’m actually quite happy that it turned out as good as it did. Nobody’s ever mentioned it, so I don’t know if anybody ever noticed that’s how I did it. People hear it, and they go, “That’s nice,” or they say, “That doesn’t sound like the other stuff on the album.” It was just a personal challenge and a fun challenge.

You also round things out with “The Hanukkah Waltz,” an original which features Andy Statman.

BF: With the Hanukkah song, my mother’s side of my family is Jewish, so I thought it was a good move to respect that part of my family and also that part of American culture. We have Christmas and we also have Hanukkah. And, when I was a kid, we did both Christmas and Hanukkah.

And then Andy Statman is one of my favorite musicians in the world, so the idea of having him come in and do some mandolin and some clarinet seemed like a great opportunity. In fact, he’s come out with the band a few times and toured with us over the years. During the period before Jeff Coffin was a full-time member, when we were trying things out with a lot of different people, he came out for a couple of week-long trips. He’s an Orthodox Jew, and there were certain nights of the week where he couldn’t work, so it was a bit impractical for him to join full time, but he was so great to play with and he’s one of my lifelong heroes and a mentor that I’ve listened to since I was first learning how to play the banjo. He’s one of the greatest musicians on the planet, in my opinion.

I really should have invited him to New York, but there was sort of a train going along once Howard dropped out and we knew Sierra was gonna be there and all that kind of stuff. I just started playing it safe, but I’d love to do more with him. He’s just a marvel.

Shifting to your current string of shows, it has been over 15 years since Jeff has toured with The Flecktones. While you have crossed paths during that time, and this outing was originally intended to showcase a new configuration featuring both Jeff and Howard, the run has allowed you to revisit that period in the band’s history for the first time in a number of years. What have your takeaways from the reunion been?

BF: That’s true. We made a lot of records with Jeff and really explored that group, and I’m really glad that we’ve been able to re-investigate the four-piece band material that we created and toured for so many years—so many more years than we played with Howard, really. Despite losing Howard and that being a loss for this tour, it has been great having Jeff out with us. We can really focus on that for a little bit, and we can remember how special that period was as well.

Some people will go, “The Flecktones are really the band with Howard Levy, the first three years,” but so much of the band’s touring life was without him. And then he came back, and it was great—and it is great when he’s there. But there’s a tendency to dismiss or forget what the band was during our time with Jeff. I’m guilty of that as well. It was a really lovely period. His rhythm is so powerful, and his voice is so strong, and there’s some extra room, because the piano isn’t in there, for the banjo to do a lot more on the lower register and to be a courting board without having that conflict. Although we have plenty of stuff like that with Howard, too, it’s a different palette. So it’s really neat that both bands are in existence right now, and the whole idea was to put them together, finally, after all this time—and that was what this tour was going to be. But then Howard had this health issue come up, and he had to drop out. Maybe we’ll be able to have them together another year. That would really be fun.

Besides the opportunity to have Jeff and Howard on the road together, which sadly did not come to fruition, what made you decide to tour behind the Jingle All The Way record after so many years this fall?

BF: Well, way back when we did the record, we did a little run that ended with some shows at the Blue Note in New York. And, for about three years, we would put together a little Christmas run—a few dates leading into Christmas. We’d bring over the Alash Ensemble, or they’d be coming over anyway to do their own thing, and they were really game to join in—they enjoyed coming over, and we discovered it was a magic concert.

It was really fun and people loved it—sometimes people like to hear you play pieces that they’ve known their whole life because, when you’re improvising on a piece that you’ve written, the listener doesn’t necessarily have an intimate knowledge of what the melodies are and what the rhythms are and what you’re doing with them. But if you play a piece that’s in everybody’s DNA, like a Christmas song, for instance, everybody gets it immediately. When we start “Jingle Bells” with the Alash Ensemble, we’ve changed the rhythm setup, but people still get it—or when we play “Silent Night,” it immediately becomes clear that it’s not being done the way that it usually is. You feel it intuitively. It’s a different experience, so it’s kind of nice. And sometimes people who write their own music, like myself, can get trapped into feeling like they have to only do their own music.

That’s why musicians will sometimes put together an album of covers—it’s good for the audience and it’s good for the artist to just have a different approach to things. It’s a way to escape being limited by your own creativity, reach outside and experience someone else’s composition. But it’s also hard to do when you pride yourself on composing.

For me, a big part of what I like to do is create new music, so it’s hard to get excited about playing someone else’s music. But this was just a case where it all made sense. And doing the Africa project [Throw Down Your Heart] was another one that made sense—I’m not writing African music, so I said, “I’m gonna play with real musicians who play that music. It’s in their DNA, and they’ve been playing it their whole lives, and they learned it from their parents, and I’m just lucky to be in the room with them.” That was another album where I was very happy not to play my own music.

So there’s a lot of thought that goes into this. We never want to be thought of as selling out, but The Flecktones have also never been afraid of something being successful or that something being successful would make it bad somehow. We always want people to like it. We’re reaching out—trying to make music that we love and are proud of and that connects with people.

Christmas is also the one time of the year when jazz music and the Great American Songbook catalog become pop music for a few weeks and can be heard everywhere from the radio and retail stores.

BK: It accesses a period of your youth because music has a tendency to adhere to us in different periods. The people who’ve studied this would say that when you get into your later years, over 30, 35, 40, it doesn’t adhere as much. The stuff earlier in your life adheres, especially in your teen years. You find your people—people who agree with you on your music. But the stuff that’s with us since we were children is just so embedded in us. Hearing it again brings back the feelings that we had when we first heard that music—these feelings of being young and having wonder and joy, and that’s what I love about this music. I don’t have any kind of religious connection to it. That’s not my reason for liking the music. It’s in me, just like it is in everybody else, and I thought if we could be really creative about it, then it was worth doing.

The Alash Ensemble, the Tuvan throat singers you mentioned, appear on Jingle All The Way and are part of the current tour. They are a perfect fit for the music but also an unexpected guest choice. How did they enter the mix?

BF: When I first got signed to Warner Brothers in Nashville, they had this other band called Take 6 on the label. Take 6 was a monster a cappella jazz group, and it was just freaky that they had been signed to the Nashville Warner Brothers, but the head of the label, Jim Ed Norman, felt like he should sign good music, whatever it was.

He had a huge success with Take 6, and then they signed me right after—they had Mark O’Connor on the label doing his creative instrumental music, and then I got on there. And, at the time, I was just gonna do a solo record, and I ended up creating The Flecktones and bringing them with me, so they got a lot more than they bargained for with that. But, at any rate, Jim heard Kongar-ool Ondar, who was the pre-eminent Tuvan throat singer, and he just flipped out. He couldn’t believe it, and he signed him to this progressive label in Nashville. But they didn’t know what to do with him. It was like, “They made a great album. Now what do we do? Who else can we put him with? Well, there’s The Flecktones. Maybe the Flecktones would have him on some dates?” Nobody wants the record label to tell you who you should play with, but we had a good relationship with Warner Brothers, so we gave it a listen, and we thought it was absolutely fantastic. We thought he was amazing. The guys were all learning about throat singing anyway—they’re all fans of throat singing. And, sure enough, he came out to a few gigs and completely stole the show. He killed it.

We had him on our Live at the Quick album and on Outbound as well—the studio album that led to Live at the Quick. So he became a real friend of the band, and any time he was around and wanted to come out, we would include him. He would always steal the show, and it was always fun.

Ondar had a bunch of proteges in Tuva—he was teaching Tuvan children and raised up all of these new Tuvan Throat singers, including Alash, the guys that are on our current tour. Ondar has since passed away, but Alash started touring the United States and got in touch with us. They had become big Flecktones fans because their hero, their mentor, had played with us. So they asked if we’d consider collaborating with them. At first I was like, “Well, we’ve already done the throat-singer thing, and we’re always trying to move into new ground, but I’ll listen to the record just to check it out.”

And I was just knocked out. I wasn’t expecting it to be so good and so deep—I thought it was gonna be a knockoff of Ondar, and it wasn’t. It was anything but that. It was really creative, really high-level music. And so I said, “Well, we’re making this Christmas record. If you want to come over and spend a day with us, why don’t we do that?” And so, sure enough, they came over and we learned one of their tunes, “Dyngyldai”—it’s a Harvest song that fit the season because, obviously, they don’t have Christmas over there. It’s a different religious structure.

We recorded everything in one day and had a blast. They left, and then we finished the record, and it stuck. Then we got in touch with them about coming out with us on tour. So that’s how it all started.

For your current holiday tour, you are playing many of the tracks off of Jingle All The Way as well as a few seasonal tunes not on the record and a sprinkling of Flecktones originals. The throat singers do some of their own material, too. I am sure you had to shift gears when Howard was unable to join, but how did you originally go about putting together the setlist for this run, which is more or less a set body of work?

BK: This is more of a “show” than the Flectomes typically do. In the old days, when Jeff was in the band, we had a huge list of songs to draw from, so the show could change every night. Every night was a different set. But this time, when we’re getting together this one time for 21 shows, it just seemed like we should make up a setlist, learn the music and really get into it.

We did the first couple of nights, and I don’t think anything has sifted since then. So looking for new setlists is pointless—on the nights when Sierra’s not there, then maybe we change things up a little bit, but she’ll be with us through Bethesda, Maryland, and then we’ll be back to the four us, though we will still have the throat singers. And it is not even just the same setlist—it’s the same jokes!

Once we figure out what works, we’re sticking to it. With The Flecktones, part of me is like, “That’s not how we do it.” But part of me is also like, “Hey, this is really working, and the more we polish it, the better the show is. People aren’t coming back every night, and the setlists aren’t different, so there’s no real point in trying to change it up and portray it as something different from night to night. People aren’t taping it and talking about how they like the differences. We’re trying to build a structure—and within that structure there’s lots of improvisation, as always.

There’ll be more spectacular nights and then nights when we’re scuffling a little bit, just like with everything and just like with every band. So that’s the story there. And honestly, since Howard came back into the band, we haven’t had the vast catalog of songs that we can all play on a dime anyway, so those sets have been more structured and more typical than we would normally do it.

We did eight shows, during several days in September, with Howard, and that’s all we’re doing. So we’re not going to change the set every night because these songs are hard. We’re playing them well, and we thought, “We might as well stick to what we’re doing because we’re not going to get tired of them.” If you’re playing 150 shows, 200 shows a year, you can’t do that and survive. You just become brain dead, and you stop caring because the songs are in the same order every night and the jokes are the same.

With that in mind, in Nashville and New York, you brought out your wife Abigail Washburn to sing on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Her entrance was pretty theatrical as well, dancing on stage while wearing a colorful Christmas sweater. How pre-meditated was her cameo?

BF: Part of me feels like this show could be a free-for-all thing—all kinds of people could get up there—but the other part of me that’s a perfectionist loves it being the same people and just honing this stuff. We had a pretty good night last night [in New York]. Everybody was playing really well, but every night every song hasn’t gone that way every time. It’s taken these repeated gigs to really get into the flow and really start sounding like we are at the top of our game, which we can be now and again. But, it doesn’t happen by just showing up. It takes a lot of work in this band.

I think early on Jeff said, “Hey, why don’t you get Abby up to sing?” And I was like, “Well, I love that, I just didn’t want to be the guy to suggest it.” I didn’t want any nepotism, it’s my wife—but everybody liked the idea.

She didn’t want to just jump up there either. In Nashville, she was like, “Oh, I’m just coming to see the show.”  And we said, “Oh, come on Abby, you love singing Christmas carols. Just come up and sing a Christmas carol with us—it’ll be fun. You’ll be glad later on.” And so she did that in Nashville and had a great time.

When we did the Beacon, she was actually in New York recording for her new record and she was gonna be there anyway, so it managed to dovetail perfectly, and I was really thrilled to have her up there for that song. She sounds so great—it was a great moment in the show, and I like how she danced on stage in her sweater and did the whole thing like you described it. That’s how she felt comfortable doing it—by trying to be jokey. I was actually just thrilled to hear her sing in the middle of it and have her great voice in the mix. She’s my partner.

Sierra has a great voice as well, though she’s hardly singing during the show. But I love her singing.

Sierra was a fantastic addition to the show but also a surprising pivot when Howard had to sit out the run. When did you initially reach out to her?

BF: It started to become clear that Howard was in an incredibly uncomfortable situation. And he let me know that it wasn’t looking good. He said, “I don’t see how I can do it.” Immediately, the first thing I said was, “I hope you’re OK.” And then the second thing was, “What are we gonna do? What should we do?” Even before we knew he definitely couldn’t do it, I thought, “We should be prepared.” I kept thinking, “He’s gonna get to the doctor, and then they’re gonna say, ‘It’s nothing,’ and he’ll be fine in three days.” But that’s not what happened. They said, “You need to be home for a while and deal with this.”

And don’t worry, it’s not a life-threatening thing—it’s just his private business. Then it was about thinking, “Who would be a good fit?” I started mulling it over, and thought, “Edgar was on the record, maybe I should ask him?” I was also thinking about Andy Statman and other different ideas, and then, somehow, Sierra popped up as an idea.

I thought, “It would she be great, musically, for the band, and it would also be a fun thing for the guys. I have a good, friendly relationship with Sierra, and I really know her playing now. We’ve developed a good rapport from the My Bluegrass Heart concerts, and I just thought, “Not only would it be great for the band and not only will it be a sparkle of something different, but it’d be really great for her to have that experience because The Flecktones don’t come around very often, and I wanted her to be able to get up there and experience that from the center.”

I’m a little bit mentory with her—I helped produce her record Weighted Mind, and I saw how sharp she is, musically. So I love to help stimulate different ideas for her and get her out of the box because she’s very much from the bluegrass world and doing a great job of finding her own voice—and it’s a progressive voice as well. But there’s certain things that I grew up with, this jazz consciousness, coming from New York, and she hasn’t been as exposed to all that. There are certain things that I learned from all my years playing with Wooten brothers, Howard and Jeff. She hasn’t had that experience, so I thought that it would be really neat for her and it’s turned out to be great all around.

But, when I asked her, she was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just getting home from a year of touring, and I was so looking forward to being home. Let me think about what I can do.” At first, I thought, “She’s not gonna do it,” but then she got back in touch and said, “I’d love to do the middle chunk.” And it was a big chunk, so I was thrilled.

It’s a lot of work learning this music, so I said to her, “Before you make your decision, Sierra, listen to these two songs.” I sent her “12 days of Christmas” and the Christmas medley because they’re very complicated. And, thankfully, she still wanted to do it. I asked Edgar as well, but he was just feeling overwhelmed.

So we have Sierra as a special guest for the middle 10 shows—we did the first few without her, and we’re gonna do the last five without her. It was fun, for the first few shows, to sort of respect the Jeff Coffin version of the Flecktones and let it have its moment in the sun again. It’s hard to get Jeff during the year because Dave Matthews has them very busy and he needs to be available for whatever they need to do. But this time of year, they’re usually not doing anything.

Though Jeff and Howard were, unfortunately, unable to tour together this fall, there have been a handful of times when they have shared the stage, including your big Red Rocks show in 2019 and, more recently, when The Flecktones opened for Dave Matthews Band at the Gorge this summer. Can you describe how they interact, musically, from your perspective?

BF: So there’s been a number of times when that’s happened. When Jeff was in the band, we would come through Chicago and Howard would come out to visit and sit in on a few songs, and it always worked like gangbusters. There was never any competition, there was never any overplaying. There was always real listening going on, and it’s almost like they turned into a mini horn section. Howard would usually be on the harmonica—I don’t think we’ve ever had him on piano with Jeff in the band, though it may have happened at some point at one of our shows and it certainly happened at the Dave Matthews show at the Gorge. We got Jeff out and we did a tune with them both there. But, it’s just one more color. I was very excited about how we could orchestrate some of the music and use them as a horn section, or a string section, and create interesting textures that the band has never had before. Hopefully, we’ll get to do that sometime.

They are very good team players—they both know how to play in a section, and in a group, without dominating. Those muscles jump forward whenever they’ve been together with us, but doing a whole night has just never happened, and I was very much looking forward to it.

As we’ve discussed, Jingle All The Way was the final Flecktones album with Jeff and then you took a break and came back with Howard in 2010. The Flecktones released Rocket Science in 2011, but the group hasn’t made an album since then, though you have worked on lots of projects individually and continued to tour together on occasion. Have you thought about putting together another Flecktones album at some point down the road?

BF: This hasn’t been talked about. Everybody’s busy, and it would take a certain commitment. In the past, if we were going to do a record, it would mean that we’re going to go out and tour for a year, or even three years, and hit it hard. And I don’t know if people are in a place to do that again, so it’s just a different expectation. The other thing was that, back when we were making records a lot—especially in the beginning—the internet wasn’t a thing yet. We’d play new music on stage and use it as a training ground. We’d be learning new songs every day, but once people started taping and sharing those recordings, the next day those new songs were up and it made it a little hard to work on new things because your first, rough version was already out there. And then you finally get into the studio, get things the way you want them to be and people inevitably say, “The rough version from the first night that they played it is better. The studio version sucks.”

It’s like, “Come on, just leave us alone, let us make our music, you know?” So we started having to rehearse music that we were going to record at a later point during the day and then not play that music in front of the audience at night—or else it would already be out by the time the record was released. And then nobody cared about the record.

A great part of the early records, and making those records really great, was that we had time-tested them in front of an audience. Once you play a piece in front of the audience, you realize, “I need to leave more space here for applause or the build isn’t right—it’s not working right, it’s not fitting right.” All kinds of things immediately become clear, so the last record we made with Howard, we just did it all in the studio. We had a rehearsal, and then we recorded it as if were just doing a record with a friend, rather than spending months really working the crap out of it and refining everything, which has always led to our music being better, in my opinion.

Our music is a little different from some other people’s music in that it’s not just a jam. It’s highly crafted and then it goes back and forth between hardcore improvising and highly scripted, composed music, and that’s always been what has made it special. So, to make a long answer shorter, there’s no reason that we wouldn’t record again and there’s also no reason that we would record again—at least not yet.

If I had a bunch of tunes that were burning a hole in my pocket, and I really needed to get them down before I forgot them, then I could probably sell it to everybody. But we would need the right plan and a realistic understanding of what we would be trying to do together if we made a record like that again. I just don’t know if that’s on the front burner for anybody right now. Although, after this tour, we’ll talk, and we’ll see what everybody’s thinking about and how it fits into their lives.

In the meantime, this tour has been a very nice way to get together in a way that doesn’t involve creating brand new music, which is a big job. We would really want to do it right when, and if, we do that again. The Christmas music already exists—it’s really good, it’s really fun and Jeff’s available at that time of year, generally, so it’s not impossible that this could become a more regular thing. We just have to talk about it after this tour. It feels like it’s going really well though.