With “December Dreams (Radio Edit),” the Boston-bred, LA-based composer and percussionist Julian Loida teams with Don Mitchell from Darlingside to bring us a winter ballad that sounds both intimate and striking, like stepping into a snow-muffled dreamscape you don’t want to wake up from.
The song commences with the signature sensation of Loida, a world where thrilling textures collide with emotional openness, and genre lines dissolve into something both tender and extraordinary, perpetually on the move. Drawing from folk, neo-classical, and ambient sources, “December Dreams” unfurls with a hushed grandeur, its melodies wafting like breath on a frosty night. Loida’s history as a percussionist becomes its heartbeat, gentle, patient, deeply human, while Mitchell’s voice roots the song in a warmth that feels hand-held and near.
What’s particularly striking about this release is its origin story. Composed during a time of emotional turmoil, it is a song that turns heartache, fatigue, and yearning into something vast rather than reductive. An improvised late-night jam on vibraphone was the seed that grew into a rich hybrid of striking scoring, Afro-Cuban momentum and feeling, gentle vocal layers, and broad brass. The effect is one that carries the feel of spontaneity and fine craftsmanship simultaneously, as if it seized a moment of clarity amid mid-winter fog.
"December Dreams (Radio Edit)" is not so much a song about longing as one that somehow manages to sound like longing. In the off hours, when darkness is but a suggestion and televisions hum in living-room lamps. Where quiet epiphanies come only after the world goes silent, Loida and Mitchell have created a composition that turns emotional excess into something breathtakingly gentle.