Don't Shoot Me Santa

Drop everything and go to Rhapsody at once to stream The Killers’ Christmas single. “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” is one of the greatest songs ever written. The effect: Johnny Cash, Dusty Springfield, The Sweet, the Beach Boys, and Morrisey take turns on a rotating karaoke stage somewhere outside Juarez festooned in broken snow globes and dazzling palm-tree-and-flamingo Christmas lights. Brandon Flowers is never better than when he captures the secret heart of the cocksure coke-gobbling indie Adonis: getting beat up and ridiculed as a kid and channeling all his inner boyhood manliness into a thundering romantic soul too outsized for suburbia, even West Coast suburbia. Never mind that “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” has like twelve separate parts, three affected voices, a horn section, a bells section, a squealing little revelation of a guitar outro, and a dead stop less than a minute where the decks are cleared to deliver the line “A bullet in his what?“ I’ll listen to, and love, this song for the rest of my life, and if that’s not what Christmas singles are all about, may Santa strike me dead.

UPDATE: There’s a YouTube video, of course.