Chelsea Spear has been a music critic, a show promoter, a college radio host, and a video director… but all she really wanted to do was start a band. Not long after learning to play the ukulele, she formed the bedroom recording project Travels With Brindle. Her melodic original songs and wry, poignant lyrics have attracted a growing audience at open mics and busking pitches in the Greater Boston area. Spear is inspired by lo-fi songwriters and jangle pop acts of the 1980s and ‘90s, and her work has been compared to the Marine Girls, the Raincoats, Courtney Barnett, and Liz Phair. Currently Spear is recording her first full album of original songs, led by a well-received series of 2022 singles that includes “Ivan,” “Linden Street,” and “Something’s Wrong.”
On Writing Christmas Songs:
Picture it: Peabody, Massachusetts, early December of 1989. My mom and I have just gone shopping for Christmas gifts for my grandparents at the nice mall with the Jordan Marsh, and after loading the trunk with the finest flannel shirts and silk scarves the store had to offer, I jumped into the passenger seat and tapped the volume knob to turn on the radio. Mom had allowed me to put on the left-of-the-dial outpost instead of her preferred AOR station, and she was probably bracing herself for a dour, bass-heavy yowl.
The song that tumbled out of the speakers instead made me feel like we’d been rushed through the door and entered the coolest Christmas party ever. A tactile guitar line scratched out a riff that greeted us like an old friend, instantly sounding familiar; a double-tracked sax solo invited us to boogie in our seats; a piano twinkled through the mix like a blinking fairy light, and a melodic bassline and metronome-accurate drum pulsated and percolated through the gathering, keeping everyone on the beat in the catchiest way possible. At the center of the mix was a chatty lady, who I imagined was sitting on a table at the center of the gathering, telling a story of infatuation lost and regained in a supermarket line on Christmas eve. You could almost hear her eyerolls, deadpan expressions, and exaggerated gestures as she talked in double time.
As the song wound to its conclusion, fading into a slower, more cynical Christmas song, I let out a laugh from the center of my chest. “Who was that?” Mom asked. I was the family whiz kid who identified singles on all the local radio stations the way most kids identified baseball players, but even I was stumped.
“Tom Tom Club?” I guessed.
We heard the song a few more times that Christmas and it slid to the back of my mind, until the following Christmas when I heard it again. And the Christmas after that. Finally, when I was 15 and started working at a record store, I asked one of the old timers who did the song that was all over the radio every year, with the fast-talking lady and the sax solo and the chirping “merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” refrain.
Reader, it was not Tom Tom Club, but rather a six-piece ensemble that occasionally played shows with Tina, Chris, and their cohort, who would become a one-and-a-half hit wonder on the basis of a bratty, flirty earlier single that got shut out of the top 40 and the title song for a short-lived new wave sitcom, whose main creative force was a member of Fluxus and would eventually live a few PATH stops away from me when I moved to New Jersey for the summer. I would eventually find everything they’d released in dusty racks at used record stores and developed a fondness for a song they wrote as a tribute to Television, and later still I would ask the guy who wrote the song to produce my own weird Christmas song.
All of this was ahead of me on that cold night at the tail end of the 1980s, as Mom’s little Toyota Corolla backed out of the mall parking lot and we headed home, singing all the way.
Holiday Playlist by Travels With Brindle: