‘Matt Hagen’s Christmas Bath’ Is a New Holiday Classic

Sitting in the woods one gorgeous Vermont summer day four years ago, Matt Hagen dreamed of snow and sleigh bells — and maybe a little murder, too.

“I became obsessed with making a Christmas record,” the singer-songwriter recalled of the out-of-season bolt of inspiration that ultimately led to Matt Hagen’s Christmas Bath, his new, one-of-a-kind holiday album. “I felt so strongly that it was time for a new Christmas classic, for new songs that people can sing every year when the holiday comes around.”

After four years of writing music and calling on his extensive list of friends and fellow musicians to help, Hagen’s holiday passion project has arrived just in time for caroling in the snow — or the tub. Christmas Bath is a collection of 10 brand-new Christmas tunes penned by Hagen, who hopes they will become classics. Tracks include a song about a crook finding a seasonably suitable disguise (“Cheap Santa Suit”), an ode to a Puerto Rican holiday cocktail (“Coquito”) and, yes, the Christmas murder ballad “Stagger Lee.”

Packed with some of the biggest names in Vermont music, including Grace Potter and Phish’s Jon Fishman, Christmas Bath makes a great case to be your new go-to holiday record. Joined by several of the record’s guest stars and collaborators, Hagen celebrates its release on vinyl with a show on Wednesday, December 18, at Nectar’s in Burlington.

Christmas Bath is the shiny new toy in Hagen’s sack of big ideas. For those keeping track, he fronts the surf-rock band the High Breaks, plays bass in the Rage Against the Machine cover band Burning Monk, covers Pink Floyd with Dark Side of the Mountain, runs the Matt Hagen Murder Ballads series, raps as Matt Hagen MC, has written and recorded a rock opera about a man falling in love with a dolphin, and has soundtracked the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The man is a content-producing machine whose primary motivation seems to be finding the answer to one question: Wouldn’t this be cool?

But for all that creativity, Hagen has rarely if ever produced a finished product like Christmas Bath. The album has been available to stream since December 1, but in order for it to properly achieve “Christmas classic” status, Hagen felt it needed to be released on vinyl.

“I’m honestly terrible at putting stuff like this out,” Hagen admitted. “I usually just finish a project and move on to the next thing, but my dream is that Christmas Bath gets pulled out of the record cabinet every December.”

Hagen has had a holiday album on his radar ever since he helped produce Potter’s Christmas special for her pandemic-era weekly streaming show, “Monday Night Twilight,” in 2020.

“Grace had just moved back to Vermont from California and was doing this holiday thing, so I wrote and debuted ‘Christmas Bath’ on it,” Hagen recalled.

According to Potter, the song was such a hit that people kept asking her about “Christmas Bath” after the show.

“Hagen is a dude with a serious vision, and it’s always awesome to see him work,” Potter said by phone from her farm in Moretown. “He’s the guy who isn’t afraid to look under the weirdest rock, and if he finds something slithering under it, he’s making friends with it.”

Hagen’s mission was to craft holiday classics that veer away from typical Christmas fare. There are no religious hymns or odes to candy, and most of the tracks are definitely for adult holiday parties — “Stagger Lee,” for example, ends with narrator Kris Brown bellowing, “Ho, ho, holy shit, it’s Christmas!”

“I’m hoping there’s some new classics on here,” Hagen said.

There are certainly strong contenders. “Christmas Songs on the Moon” is an ethereal slice of dream pop, with Potter conjuring the perfect scene of solitude while singing lines such as “Moon dust in stockings, filled with lunar love, light from the stars and Earth up above.”

“Hallelujah, What God Is Yours?” finds Hagen in a contemplative mode. “Throughout recorded history, we can count anywhere from 8,000 to 12,000 gods who have been worshipped,” Brown proclaims in the song’s spoken intro, “but the only god or gods that really matter or exist are the ones or one that YOU believe in.” A call-and-response verse follows with locals such as Andriana Chobot, James Kochalka, Caroline O’Connor, Craig Mitchell and Fishman — who croons “God can give, or not give, a fuck” — trading lines like Vermont’s answer to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

The album is truly a Christmas card from the Vermont music scene, featuring many of Hagen’s usual collaborators: Guitarist Bob Wagner, keyboardist Mike Fried, drummer Cotter Ellis and pedal steel player Tony Naples pop up on the majority of the tracks. Special guests such as musical saw player Johnnie Day Durand and singer Josh Panda are among the more than 20 Vermont musicians and artists who appear on Christmas Bath.

“This album really is the Burlington music scene all wrapped up into a present for everybody,” Potter said. “And Hagen is like the craziest Santa of them all.”

Star power aside, Hagen hopes that, like with any good Christmas album, it’s the true meaning of the holidays that resonates with listeners.

“I hope people find Christmas Bath as a funny, thoughtful record that is a genuine love letter to the season,” Hagen said. “Or, at the least, inspire[s] them to pour themselves a coquito.”

Orange Peel Candy

Christmas Bath contributor James Kochalka‘s favorite holiday treat, which he learned to make while watching his mom when he was little

Ingredients

• Any amount of orange peel (or grapefruit or lemon peel)
• Equal parts sugar and water (1 cup sugar, 1 cup water for a small batch)

Directions

1. Eat the fruit, but save the peels for later in a sealed container or plastic bag so they don’t dry out.
2. Boil the peels to soften the white pith, then pour the water off. Do this 4 times for orange, up to 6 for lemon and grapefruit.
3. Cool the orange peel by running under cold water.
4. Cut or scrape the now-softened pith from the peel with a paring knife.
5. Cut the orange peel into thin strips for a traditional look (but any shape works).
6. Cook the strips of peel in a mix of equal parts sugar and water. A real candy chef would suggest a precise temperature to bring it to and for how long … but I totally wing it, and it’s never gone wrong! When it looks a little gooey, turn heat to low to keep the peels from hardening while you do the next steps.
7. Use a fork to remove the peels one by one. Roll each in white sugar (otherwise they will dry to a very pretty, glossy finish, but they might be stickier).
8. Individually lay the strips on a sheet of parchment paper to dry and harden.

Ukrainian Pierogies (Pyrohy)

Christmas Bath contributor Andriana Chobot‘s family recipe, handed down from her grandmother

Ingredients for the dough

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 cup lukewarm milk (whole, oat or soy)
• 3 teaspoons sour cream
• 3 teaspoons oil (avocado or veggie)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg (or flax “egg”)
• 5 cups all-purpose flour

Ingredients for the pyrohy

• 5-pound bag of potatoes
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 cup grated cheddar cheese
• Diced onion (optional)
• Butter or oil

Directions

1. Make the dough: Mix water, milk, sour cream, oil, salt and egg together with the whisk attachment. Slowly add the flour and mix.
2. Let the covered dough stand in the fridge for a few hours.
3. Fill one medium boiling pot generously to the top with well-peeled potatoes, which should yield about three-quarters of a pot of mashed potatoes. Boil potatoes in water; drain immediately. Add salt and pepper generously and mash.
4. Add grated cheddar to the hot potatoes and mash. Let cool.
5. Roll out dough to approximately 1/16 of an inch thin and cookie-cut into 2.5-inch rounds. Form into dumplings — floured hands are essential! For help forming the dough, search YouTube for Alina in Foodland’s “Traditional Ukrainian dumplings with potatoes!” video.
6. Make sure not to get potatoes in between the two sides of your pinched dough, or they will fall apart.
7. Be sure to place the pyrohy on a floured surface, separated, and cover with a damp dish towel before cooking in batches.
8. Place small batches of pyrohy in boiling, salted water for five minutes, until floating. Or fry with onion in a well-oiled stovetop pan until golden brown.
9. Transfer to a metal bowl, add butter or oil to prevent sticking, and store in another container so that you can reuse the metal bowl for the next batch.
10. Serve with sauerkraut, bacon bits, sour cream and/or cottage cheese.

This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.

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