Christmas Single by Too Much Joy

TMJ’s Christmas single was recorded in 2001, as an offering to fans who were visiting their hard-to-find website (someone else was squatting on toomuchjoy.com at the time, so they chose a url based on an obscure lyric from “Susquehanna Hat Company”).

It was recorded at The Loft, the studio in Bronxville where they’d recorded their first demos twenty years earlier. The first track is about getting a Christmas present from a girl you have a crush on but didn’t realize thought of you the same way. The second track imagines a country where every lonely loser’s made-up girlfriend actually exists. The artwork was drawn by Tim’s daughter, who was 7 at the time.

TMJ is/was a punk-pop band of some minor renown. Some of that renown was due to their music, which included semi-hits such as “Crush Story,” “Donna Everywhere,” and “That’s a Lie” — a cover of the LL Cool J tune that featured the man himself in the music video, which actually got played quite a bit during daylight hours on MTV back when they did that sort of thing.

toomuchjoy.com