There is a version of Christmas that exists only on record — unhurried, a little melancholy, made by people who actually care about sound — and Holidays Rule is the best argument for it I’ve heard in years.
Atlantic Records put this together in 2012 as a genuine labor of love, not a cash-grab clearance bin filler. The roster reads like a dream dinner party: Paul McCartney, The Shins, Cee Lo Green, Norah Jones, Andrew Bird, Ron Sexsmith, She & Him, Punch Brothers, Diana Krall. Not a karaoke crew. People who play instruments and mean it.
The Sessions
The project was overseen with quiet confidence by producer Mitchell Froom, which explains everything. Froom — the guy behind Crowded House and Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing — knows how to make a studio feel like a room someone actually lives in. These recordings don’t smell like a shopping mall. They smell like candle wax and old wood.
She & Him’s “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is exactly the thing you wanted Zooey Deschanel to make before you were afraid to admit you wanted it. M. Ward plays with the kind of studied restraint that sounds effortless and takes ten years to learn.
Andrew Bird’s “Twelve Days of Christmas” is the track I keep returning to. He turns it inside out with his usual violin loops and whistling, finding melancholy in a song that has no business being melancholy. It shouldn’t work. It completely works.
The McCartney Moment
Paul McCartney contributes “It’s Not Christmas ‘Til Somebody Cries,” a song he wrote himself for the occasion. It is unambiguously a Paul McCartney song — melodically generous, slightly bittersweet, effortlessly constructed. He makes it look stupid-easy.
Norah Jones does “Christmas Calling (All Around the World)” — produced by Froom as well — and it sounds exactly like putting on a heavy coat and standing in a parking lot at night, in the good way.
Diana Krall’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” doesn’t reinvent anything, but her piano touch is so light and exact that it doesn’t need to. She simply plays it true.
The Sequencing
What separates this from ninety percent of holiday compilations is that it was sequenced like an album rather than assembled like a playlist. There’s arc here. The Punch Brothers’ “Away in a Manger” lands where it lands because of what came before it. Chris Thile’s mandolin and his bandmates’ classical bluegrass precision make something ancient sound genuinely new.
Cee Lo Green’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” swings hard — full brass, full soul, no apologies. It’s the moment where the record opens a window and lets the cold air in.
Ron Sexsmith contributes “Maybe This Christmas,” and if you don’t know that song, this is a good place to meet it. He has a voice that sounds like it has earned every note, and the arrangement here is spare and perfect.
There are records you put on in early December when the house is quiet and the tree is lit and you have a drink in your hand and absolutely nowhere to be. This is that record.