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Kathy Mattea
Kathy Mattea Records New Christmas Album for 2003
Ten years after winning a Grammy award for Good News, a collection of Christmas songs, Kathy Mattea returns to the subject with a holiday album that adds a decade’s worth of artistic and spiritual growth to the earlier disc’s strengths. Joy For Christmas Day is a wide-ranging yet coherent set that, like it predecessor, highlights the “good news” of the holiday and its spiritual message with a thoughtful blend of old favorites and new songs while ranging even more widely across musical boundaries.
For “Christmas Collage,” an innovative, insightful medley of traditional carols, to the elegant swing of “When The Baby Grew Up” and the supple gospel call-and response of “Baby King,” Joy For Christmas Day displays Mattea’s natural flexibility and hard-won artistic integrity. Whether she’s adapting the classic “Angels We Have Heard On High” or arranging “There’s Still My Joy,” a new contribution from award-winning writers Melissa Manchester and Beth Nielsen-Chapman, Mattea brings a fresh ear and a natural, unforced eclecticism to the project. Like Good News and her periodic Christmas concert programs, the album is, she says, “more about the spiritual side of Christmas, and not so much about the holiday” – and the result is a collection that will bring both joy and reverence to the Christmas celebration in any home.
The Songs of Joy for Christmas Day by Kathy Mattea
Christmas Collage: This is an arrangement that started with an idea of Bill Cooley’s. Bill and I have played music together for over a decade, and he’s always challenging me to think about how we can keep the show growing, how we can thing outside the box, and how we can keep fresh. We were going out on the road to tour behind Good News, and he suggested that we should try to include some more traditional music for our audiences. It took us 2 days to finish this arrangement. We were all still speaking, but barely!
Unto Us A Child Is Born: This is part of a theatre piece, written by Thom Schuyler and Craig Bickhardt that never released in great numbers but that many of us who were able to obtain a copy have loved for years. I’ve always loved this particular song.
Angels We Have Heard on High: Bill’s idea, again. I love the light, airy feel of this, and the way it builds up and then tapers back down at the end. This song makes me want to dance, and the jazz/folk combination is so different from anything else we do.
Straw Against The Chill: I was playing on a Christmas edition of Mountain Stage, and Julie Adams sang this song. There’s no razzle-dazzle to it, just a gentle power in well-written words and a classic melody. I filed it away in the back of my mind, and she helped me locate it when the time came to make this album.
Baby King: This I a Marc Cohn song. I’m told by Ben Wisch that the idea originated around the time Marc’s own son was born. I love this sassiness of it. This is our version
that we worked up for the road, recorded live in the studio as we were peaking from a grueling round of rehearsals.
When the Baby Grew Up: Rob Mathes wrote Good News, the title song from my first Christmas album. That song, and this one, is part of a larger work, a play/opera called William the Angel that he wrote. I think Rob is a genius, and I was excited to re-discover this song. We recorded this live, in the control room of Ed’s studio, sitting in a circle. Dan is playing brushed on a cookie box from lunch. Mick, our engineer, is playing slide guitar with a fork.
Hark, the Herald Angels Sing: Bill’s idea. He came to me one day on the road and asked if I’d ever thought of this song as a lullaby. We started messing with it, and I felt the words take on a totally different personality when sung with that sense of quiet wonder about it all.
O Come, All Ye Faithful: Carson Whitsett was out on the road with us and he earned his stripes playing Memphis blues on the B3. We decided, on Bill’s urging of course, to make that our jumping off point. I wonder if anyone’s ever begun a song in Latin and finished it in blues before?
All Because Of Him: Suzy Wills used to sing on the road with us. She and Bill worked together years ago with Reba. They used to write constantly on the road. This was a fragment of a song Bill brought to me. We tweaked it, and then brought Ed in to help us make it a bit more focused. It’s built around a very cool bluesy lick of Bill’s, and the tension between it and Dan’s drum pattern.
Sing, Mary, Sing: I love the play from major to minor in this song, the tension. And the joy of it. We had lots of fun playing around with the end vocals. There were a few parts that fit together beautifully, although they were recorded totally at random. I love those moments in the studio. Happy accidents.
There’s Still My Joy: I was playing at the Bluebird Café in Nashville with some women in the round. Beth was there, and Melissa was in town visiting. She sat in and sang this song. I was floored. I can still see how beautiful her hands looked on the piano that night. My father passed away from cancer while I was making this album, and I could hardy get through this song for a while. The thing that touched me was the personal resurrection, the inner one that is brought on by the larger miracle and all the layers of meaning there.
The last voice on the record is my Dad.
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Thanks For The Music
October 2003 |
