Titus Andronicus performs on March 1, 2023, at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights.
Just this week, the group released its first-ever standalone holiday single, “Drummer Boy.”
“Drummer Boy” takes the music of Billy Joel’s evergreen anthem “Piano Man” and uses it to tell the story of the nativity from the perspective of “The Little Drummer Boy,” a tune made famous in the 1958 Christmas classic of the same name.
“I first connected the dots between the great Billy Joel song and the beloved Christmas standard several years ago, but it got tossed onto the pile with so many of my other crazy ideas,” singer-songwriter Patrick Stickles explains in a press release. “Things being how they are, though, I may not have the luxury of time to execute all those crazy ideas, so when we had two days off in Montreal on our recent tour, we figured we’d grab the reindeer by the antlers and cross this one off the list, so as to avoid the pain of eternal regret. Also, I’ve noticed a lot of discourse recently about what constitutes a legitimate ‘parody’ lately, and I’d like to get a piece of that action.”
Tickets to the Titus Andronicus concert at the Grog Shop go on sale at 10 a.m. on Friday.
This article appears in Jul 13-26, 2022.
