(courtesy Apple Music)
Have you ever sat back and watched a Christmas special, especially a British one with its earthy humanity and whimsical sense of joy and felt like someone was giving you a great, big soul-reviving hug?
If you have, and here’s to everyone being so beautifully treated, you will be familiar with the warmth and loveliness that flows through every single song of Christmas Perri’s newest festive release, Songs for Christmas.
The American singer-songwriter is no stranger to Christmas music releases, having previously released the EP A Very Merry Perri Christmas in 2013, and in a release quoted on WarmFM’s site, she admits to an enduring love of Christmas that clearly informs every last song on this gorgeously album.
If you know me, you know how much I love Christmas. Recording songs for pixie earlier this year was so inspiring, that I decided to turn some of my favorite Christmas songs, and a brand new original, into lullabies as well! Happy Holidays, hope you enjoy.
The “Pixie” referred to in the title of the earlier album is her daughter born in 2022, and Songs for Christmas is intended as a way of bringing her infant child into Christmas with all the love and warmth the singer can muster, and it works to an absolutely joyous degree.
In a season where, for all the motherhood statements about peace and goodwill and love to all, that we feel more frenetically stressed and noise-assaulted than ever, it’s a treat to have an album that feels like a soft caress for the soul.
Songs like “Marshmallow World” and “Sleigh Ride” are as bouncy and vibrantly alive as ever but also being hushed and intimate too, as if Perri has invited you, yes, just you, into her festive confidence and is doling out these sublimely lovely songs for an audience of one.
Obviously that her daughter Pixie but luckily for the rest of us, we also benefit from feeling like we’re at a festive concert for one, a sense of exclusivity and intimacy enhanced by songs like original number “Christmas Dream” which is a huge wraparound hug full of lyrical allusion to sleigh rides through clouds and joy in eyes and castles of cookies, and “White Christmas” which has a near-reverent wishfulness for it which captures the lyrical intent and hopeful melancholy more fully than most iterations.
Even songs like “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” feel like they are deeply, beautiful intimately emotional, with Perri able to capture a sense of the inclusiveness and love that characterises the season to a breathtakingly delightful degree.
This is an album that more than most is infused with the kind of joy we all want to feel at Christmas and it’s in every song, very lyric sung and note played, reflecting an artist at peace with the world after some real emotional pain in the years preceding.
This is not an emptily festive joy; it knows that can be very sad and distressing and that we can stare into the abyss and wonder if we’ll ever feel joy again but which then reaffirms that happiness can return and joy can come back into our lives and we can come alive again.
And if you were to add any ultimate description to Songs for Christmas, it would be that it’s an album that captures that joyful hopefulness we all feel at this time of year, or at least hope we will feel.
We don’t always get there, and sometimes what we have it more aspiration than actuality but when you listen to Perri’s sublimely gorgeous delivery, which is light and bright but with real attendant emotional heft and substance, you feel like someone has unleashed all that joy you almost willed yourself to feel.
It’s quite simply all the feels of the season and when you’re listening to the soft exuberance of “Let it Snow” or “Christmas Waltz” you fall into a kind of healing soft reverie that soothes the soul, quiets the stormy torment of a stressful year and takes you to a place where you can stop and truly appreciate the soul-reviving beauty and love of the season.
Songs for Christmas is quite simply one of the most beautiful Christmas albums you will ever listen to, and that will happen repeatedly so get ready, and when songs like “Wonderful Christmas”, buoyed by Perri’s emotively rich vocals as are all the songs, come on you will feel like all the aspirational hopes for the season have come to fruition in an album that is Christmas poured into 12 exquisitely affecting and joyously beautiful songs.