Your holiday playlist addition: Stoneshiver Christmas, Vol. 1.

Plus, Merced's rock icon Roddy Jackson dies at 80.

Check the grind on Stoneshiver.

The band had a quick bit of down time this fall when they could have slacked off, or just spent time rehearsing. Instead they put together a new EP.

From the linear notes of the Stoneshiver, Christmas Vol. 1, which dropped across platforms last week.

“During October we had a two week window between the Fresno Fair and our So-Cal run of dates where we could track the music. We recorded the instruments at our home base Mt. View Studio and sent them off to our longtime producer/engineer Pariecee McGriff in Bakersfield to be mixed and mastered.”

Singer Jesse Wilkin took a trip to Bakersfield to track vocals with McGriff and the band reached out to the University of Tennessee Women’s Chorale to help fill out the EP’s closing track.

The six songs range from sacred (“O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” “Joyful”) to secular (“Rocking Around the Christmas Tree,” “Last Christmas”) with interpretations that mostly keep in the band’s mid-temp guitar-rock wheelhouse.

Christmas covers are ubiquitous at this point.

The best of them are transformative, and Stoneshiver manages that here (especially on the darkly theatrical, almost ghostly version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”).

“Central Valley Fireball,” Roddy Jackson dead at 80

Roddy Jackson was a rock-n-roll pioneer.

The Fresno-born, Merced-raised singer and multi-instrumentalist started playing in the 1950s in one of the area’s first multiracial bands. He was a contemporary in the first-wave of rock and roll and released several singles on Specialty Records, the label that launched Little Richard.

Jackson died on Wednesday the age of 80, following complications from a surgery.

While Jackson missed mainstream recognition (and a spot of Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” according to his obituary on the Merced Sun-Star), he saw a resurgence of fame in the 2000s, including several UK festival performances and his own compilation album, “Central Valley Fireball,” released in 2013.

A celebration of Jackson’s life and memorial concerts are in the work, according to his Facebook fan page.

You can read of full take on Jackson’s life over at the Merced Sun-Star.

That’s it for this week. Remember you can now hear me on the Homegrown Show Sundays at 8 p.m. on New Rock 104.1 FM. If you have anything you think I need to be looking at or listening to, feel free to let me know: jtehee@gmail.com