Big MachineFor the 2020 Christmas season, Lady A‘s holiday album, On This Winter’s Night, grows to a mammoth sixteen cuts, as the band adds four new tracks for the record’s Deluxe Edition.
It was important to the “Champagne Night” hitmakers that the new additions be unique.
“Anybody that has our Christmas record, you know, there’s a lot of very familiar Christmas songs,” Charles Kelley explains. “And we wanted to find a couple that were familiar, but there hasn’t been a ton of covers of, you know.”
“And there really hasn’t been that many covers of “Little Saint Nick” [by the Beach Boys] or Paul McCartney‘s [“Wonderful Christmastime”] much at all,” he continues. “And so we thought that’d be kind of different and unique.”
Since the album came out in 2012, Charles, Hillary Scott, and Dave Haywood have all had kids.
“We wrote an original,” Dave points out. “The three of us sat down and wrote a song called ‘Christmas Through Your Eyes’ about kind of regaining the magic of seeing Christmas through the eyes of our children, which was a really fun write.”
Lady A also covers an obscure song used in Christmas Vacation.
“You remember the scene where Chevy Chase gets locked up in the attic and he’s playing the little reels?” Charles asks. “Well, there’s this Ray Charles song called “Spirit of Christmas,” and you can’t even find it anywhere.”
“But if you go on the internet, you can find like a YouTube clip of it,” he says. “But it’s such an amazing song, and Ray Charles, like, is just one of my idols. And so I said, ‘Man, I’ve always wanted to try this.'”
Longtime Lady A fans may remember On This Winter’s Night grew out of the A Merry Little Christmas EP from 2010.
By Stephen Hubbard
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