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.”
The idea for writing a Christmas song came almost by accident. After writing “Ivan” I’d gotten a prompt from an online songwriting group to write a song about a place. Since Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot was at the front of my mind, I immediately thought of writing a song about the reindeer farm from the elementary Russian text “Nina in Siberia” that the book’s narrator, Selin, reads at the start of the book. Snow and reindeer are festive imagery that suggest Christmas, and I went looking for a good name for this song. Unfortunately, “Experimental Reindeer Farm” doesn’t have great scansion, and most reindeer farms in the states had similarly boring names.
When I complained about this to my boyfriend, he made an offhand observation that pulled me out of my frustration: “You’d think someone would call theirs ‘Rudolph’s Ranch’.”
Having a festive song title pulled focus, and I began asking myself: What is life like for the people in Santa’s village who take care of the reindeer? Batuman’s intro-to-Russian novella doesn’t offer much detail (“[Nina] cared for the gentle reindeer and the lustrous foxes. What happiness to work a lot and forget everything!”), so I began reading about the day-to-day life of reindeer farmers.
A second spot of inspiration came from another online songwriting group, which challenged its followers to write a song with the I-II7-vi turnaround. The seventh chord reminded me of jazz music, and as someone who grew up with Charlie Brown holiday specials, jazz music always sounded like Christmas to me. I thought about how damp a farm could get and began playing a percussive strum that sounded like boots walking through mud and melted snow, singing the list of tasks that a reindeer farmer did every morning. Slowly a song began to take shape.
When I finished an early draft of the song, I shared it with the songwriting groups and got some good feedback. It felt like a concept album inspired by the themes in The Idiot was a viable option for my first album, and I submitted it to the Tiny Desk Contest in 2020, wrote up the chords, and daydreamed about a spare recording that sounded like “Blue Christmas” if Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson were itinerant English majors with a sweet tooth for literary fiction.
After revising the song with a mentor and crowdfunding the money to mix and master it, I released “Rudolph’s Ranch” in the winter of 2022. I’ve been struggling to feel merry and bright this season, and if you’re ambivalent about the holidays, I hope you find some comfort in my song.