It’s New Year’s Eve again. Once again it doesn’t mean much to me. I used to make a pile of money on New Year’s Eve back when I was a working musician, but I always hated it. Amateur hour, we used to call it, because even sober people were drunk on NYE. And you had to play late because the party didn’t start until midnight. Bah.

When I was a little kid, my parents listened to Guy Lombardo on NYE.  “Guy Lumbago,” as my dad used to call him. We had very little truck with the Guyster, don’t get me wrong; he was infinitesimally less uncool than Lawrence Welk, I guess, but he wasn’t exactly Sinatra or anything. He made 99 percent of his money in .002 percent of his time on NYE, playing Auld Lang Syne.

So on Christmas, we’d get a mangy stunted spruce at a mall parking lot, tie it to the roof of the car, and drag it inside when we got home. Easter? We’d eat a ham freed from a can using a key that was welded on the side. Mmmm, canned pineapple slices nailed to the ham with cloves. New Year’s? We’d rely on Guy Lombardo to pester Auld Lang Syne out of his orchestra, which consisted solely of 147 tenor saxophones playing in unison. And that’s the way we liked it.

But there’s a problem. Guy’s dead. If memory serves, he looked dead a long time before he fell over, too. But he Got. The. Job. Done. He was the head on the New Year’s totem pole.

We Need A New One. The official square peg for the round hole of New Year’s Eve.  I hereby nominate Max Raabe. Aw, yeah, picture it: New Year’s eve, with Max Raabe wafting from the wireless in your lebensraum while the spumante fizzes like a science experiment on the credenza. The chicks will tumble for you then, no question.