On this Christmas Eve episode of Music In Time, it's another installment of "Gifts I Gave Myself" -- an annual round-up episode featuring selections from the best albums added to host Evan McCormick's music collection in 2025. Join the fun as he creates a musical time capsule replete with tales of record collecting in far off places from Kingston's Beat Street to Sao Paulo's record markets (and some local-favorite vinyl shops). Grab a glass of eggnog and let's make some history.

Playlist
1. Stay Loose - Clancy Eccles
2. Penny I Love You - Wailing Souls
3. Stranger Than Kindness - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4. Malachi - Mecca Normal
5. Sea Hunt - Beat Happening
6. Isabel - Unrest
7. Gone - Babes In Toyland
8. XOT - Cólera
9. Desemprego - Fogo Cruzado
10. Charlie - Terraplana
11. Fever Dog - Stillwater
12. Krayola - Lung Leg
13. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer - The Street Corner Singers Featuring California Raisins
14. Christmas Night In Harlem - Louis Armstrong

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Music does not just exist. It exists in specific times and places and in the sonic world of each individual listener who engages with it. That’s the basic idea behind "Music in Time," which explores the social and political context in which songs and albums emerge, are listened to, and reflected on over the years. Host Evan McCormick uses different formats to play with the idea of music in time—sometimes focusing on a single album and detailing the social and political circumstances surrounding its release, sometimes putting together playlists that explore a theme or concept in songs through the years. Each broadcast asks: how is music shaped by its own historical moment, and, in turn, how does music shape the histories that we remember?

By day, Evan McCormick is a historian at Columbia University, where he uses oral history interviews to understand how people remember and make sense of the past. By night, McCormick is a music lover and singer-songwriter, recording under the stage name Egan Caufield. For most of his life these two worlds remained separate, but after relocating to Catskill in 2020, he chose to bring history and music together over the airwaves, and "Music in Time" was born.