Merry Christmas from Rest Assured and thank you for your continued support in 2025.
Hope you get a present from Santa, some hugs from friends and family and a much needed break from reality.
As a present, we bring you a Xmas carol from SSD and the story behind it, lifted from their facebook page.
From Al Barlie, guitarist of SSD who sadly passed away from cancer this year at the young age of 63...
“Mr. B. told me about Modern Method doing a Christmas record. I think they asked me or Mr. B asked me. At that point, I had to think about it because obviously it was a huge leap. We didn’t do normal things, let alone things like that.
We chose not to be on the Boston Not LA record, but now we were jumping in on a Modern Method record, and maybe that might be confusing to some people. But for whatever reason this, in my heart, felt right and the other one didn’t. I can’t really explain it, but I felt it, and I still feel it today despite the enormous success of Boston Not LA and the bands that benefited from being on that record. I had to now present this idea to the band after telling them we weren’t going to be on Boston Not LA.
It wasn’t a no brainer, and it was certainly something we had to think about — what song we would pick, could we pull it off? None of the other people on the record were from our genre, and maybe the only thing we had in common was Mr. B. I don’t remember a lot of Christmas records being around at that time. I knew that if it backfired, we could look stupid. And then I remember trying to figure out what song we could do that would capture our strengths, and I thought of the slow part with having Francois doing it rather than Springa because Francois has a better a voice. Francois has a Shakespearean voice — he has no Boston accent at all. He was clean. Francois tiptoed around language — it didn’t intimidate him. He could fit in in any setting. So that was key.
The easiest thing was the beat behind the song. And quite frankly, it was easy, but it wasn’t a typical SSD beat. We never really played beats like that. To me, that was more the beat of a band playing the Rat. But I think for what we were doing for that song, it was right. As it was developing, I thought it came out good, all the guys sounded good. I don’t think we embarrassed ourselves.”