Music Mondays: Have a heavy metal Christmas

Welcome to the latest feature here at Confessions of a Science Librarian -- Music Mondays! My plan is to have a vaguely music-related post here most Mondays, somewhat in the vein of my Friday Fun posts, but probably not quite as regular. I'll probably mix in short CD reviews, odd bits I've found on the web, the occasional "Five Songs I Love" feature with who knows what else I think of.

And speaking of odd bits...

Rob Halford, Metal God, Judas Priest front man, solo act with a couple of really great albums under his belt, has a new Christmas CD coming out called Wintersongs

Let's hear what he has to say for himself:

Let's focus on the business at hand for a couple moments here and talk about this Christmas record and why. The big question - I'm sure a lot of fans are asking - why bring the Halford band together for a seasonal album?

Well, it was a pretty simple idea on the basics of the whole thing and it was very much from my own personal desires and wishes, and I wasn't sure how Metal Mike (Chlasciak - guitar) and Roy Z (guitar) and Bobby (Jarzombek - drums) and Mike (Davis - bass) would take it. But do you remember I did that song for radio many years ago called 'Christmas Ride'? And then, I forget what year that was, it was around the time that we were making Crucible (actually 1994). But prior to that in the FIGHT band, around the first Fight record, I made a handful of CDs of a song called 'Silent Night' just for family and friends. So both of those experiences had been kind of locked away in the metal memory banks but never really disappeared. So each time successive Christmases would come along I would say, 'oh, God, I've done this again.' I really wanted to try and get something out this year, you know, and again for the obvious reasons of being immersed with all the metal around me, I just didn't have the time or the window or the opportunity to make it all happen. But anyway, the decision was made a long time ago. What do you think about this? Do you think it's cool? Are you up for it? Do you believe in it? What do you think we're gonna do? And everybody ran to the idea and once it got the thumbs up, then the slow piecing process bit by bit started to come together over a couple of years. And you know, when you say a couple of years, that wasn't like two years of intensity, that was just really the guys finding time in their own schedules, their own busy schedules, to put all of these ideas together as a band.