We dug up a Christmas tape from 1996 this week and posted parts of it on the Internets. Hey, it’s Christmas, right? What is the significance of this collection? Well, my friends – this project taps a deep vein in the corpus of Big Green material. These four songs, now on YouTube, represent some firsts, some lasts, and a whole lot of mister in-between.

First things first: I believe this was the first group of songs we recorded on our eight-track DTRS system back in the nineties – the same deck, board, etc., we used a couple of years later to do our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. We got the system in 1995 and did a few test tracks before getting started on this 1996 collection, which was originally eight songs, including two we revamped, remixed, and released under separate cover.

What about last? Well, this was Matt’s last Christmas collection, recorded as a giveaway to family, friends, pets, etc. It was a yearly tradition in Matt-ville, from about the mid-1980s to 1996, covering a body of work that included all of the songs off of 2000 Years To Christmas, plus many, many more (including numbers we featured in our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.)

There’s more where that came from. Enjoy your holidays!