Instrumental Invasion, Christmas 2025 Edition (12/24, 5PM; 12/25, 9PM) December 25, 2025

A special three-hour Christmas 2025 edition of Instrumental Invasion was recorded principally on December 1 with pickups recorded during quality control on the morning of the 3rd and again that afternoon in case the show didn’t only air on Christmas. Indeed, it aired Christmas Eve at 5PM and reran on Christmas at 9PM. (I use the past tense despite publishing on Christmas morning.)

Before I say more, here is the scoped aircheck:

What I said in the outro is true. WCWP/WXBA station manager Dan Cox hosted a Microsoft Teams meeting for alumni on October 27. When he opened the “floor” to questions, I had two:

• May I contribute to the rotation of legal IDs voiced by alumni?
• Would it be okay if I recorded a special Christmas show?

Dan said yes to both. Right after the meeting I recorded VO for the ID, which turned out this way:

I didn’t start work on the Christmas Instrumental Invasion until the following Monday, November 3, when Dan answered a follow-up email about show length. He said it could be as long as I wanted. So, I chose to make a three-hour show. The playlist, created and tweaked between November 3 and 15, was reworked from the playlist for what would have been the fourth and final Christmas show of my Wednesday night run. (2020, 2021, 2022 recaps) The renovation hiatus ended that run sooner than planned. 22 of the 23 songs from the unused playlist were incorporated into this one with minimal rearranging. 15 songs were added to pad out the three hours (all under an hour in length), and the 23rd song from the original playlist was changed due to time constraints in hour 2.

Annotations drafting began November 5, when I completed my first playlist draft, and tweaks followed along through the 15th. For the first time ever, I’m sharing the script. Work on that began when my initial annotations draft completed on November 10. Tweaks continued all the way into recording and pickups.

I had planned on doing as I did for the last two Homecoming Weekend prerecords (2024, 2025), by recording and mixing live on my Twitch channel from December 4 to 6. I even did like this year’s HCW show and preloaded the music and liners into Adobe Audition multitrack session files. However, I developed an obsession with the video game PowerWash Simulator 2, for which I have the Xbox Series X/S port. I wasn’t about to halt gameplay for three days when I was on the verge of completing the game’s career mode. (I did that on December 6 and completed the game entirely [in its initial form] two nights later.) So, I recorded and edited all 15 talk breaks (five per hour) in a three-hour span on December 1. Then, I mixed them into the preloaded sessions. All three hours were within the 58:00 to 59:59 range Dan Cox asks of show files with hour 1 skewing closer to the minimum at 58:20, which I reworked to 58:36. Hours 2 and 3 required reworking in the opposite direction to reach run times of 59:58 and 59:57.

The December 3 quality control session required a handful of pickups with truncating in the last two hours for even shorter times. I misinterpreted an email that afternoon, leading me to think the show either might not air on Christmas or wouldn’t be limited to Christmas. The resulting evergreen pickups worked in my favor as Dan chose to premiere the show Christmas Eve at 5PM and run it again on Christmas at 9PM. The end result hour by hour: 58:39, 59:52, 59:54. There was no dead air between files as legal IDs bridged the gaps. That meant the show after mine began before the top of the hour.

This paragraph was written December 9 after learning that Gordon Goodwin died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 70. His Big Phat Band were part of my show with “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” It’s too late for me to redo the talk break for the set with the song as I’ve already sent Dan the show hour files. Gordon will live on through his music, not just with the Big Phat Band, but for the TV shows and films he scored.

“You wanna have a catch?” in the intro was a quote from the end of Field of Dreams where Ray gets to play catch with his father. The Colin Mochrie joke about “foreplay” (not Fourplay) is a sound command for my Twitch streams and was sourced from this Whose Line video:

And lastly, pianist Bill Evans crediting “Joe LaBarbera on drums” was from the end of a live performance of “Days of Wine and Roses” at Keystone Korner in San Francisco. It’s part of a posthumous box set called Consecration: The Final Recordings Part 2.

I’ll leave you with screenshots of each completed multitrack session on the morning of December 3 (before the evergreen revisions):

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.