You hear some version of this question every year: When is it time to break out the Christmas music?
Well, Austin singer-songwriter Melissa Carper has probably had that on her mind much longer than most of us. For a while now, she’s been working on her latest album, a collection of holiday tunes featuring her own songs and a few covers, too.
It’s called “A Very Carper Christmas” and she joined the Standard for a chat about it. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Congratulations on the new record. Why a Christmas album?
Melissa Carper: Well, actually a friend of mine, who’s a manager and he’d been giving me some advice on what he thought I should do with my career, I asked him and he said, “I think you should make a Christmas album.”
And I’d never thought of the idea before and actually at first I was like, I don’t know about that. That sounds kinda cheesy. Like I don’t know if I could pull that off and for some reason I was imagining myself trying to cover the standards that had been covered over and over kinda too many times.
Then I thought, well what if I wrote an entire album of original songs? Then that could be cool, if the songs are good. And so then it kinda became a challenge for me, like can I actually do this?
And I have a lot of co-writes on the album because I asked my good friend Gina Gallina if she would want to get together and try to write Christmas songs. And and so we have eight co-writes together on there and she came up with a lot of the song ideas.
So I did not do this on my own at all. It’s a big collaboration.
I have to ask because when you think about Christmas music, you’re right, a lot of cheesy ones come to mind and I know that there are one or two that we all say, “yuck” when we’re around our friends but then secretly sing in the shower this time every year.
When you were thinking about how you would write songs for your own Christmas album, how are you thinking about those Christmas songs that like you grew up with or maybe that we all have come to know and secretly love? How were you thinking about Christmas music?
Well, I’ve always loved Christmas music.
Really?
Yes. You know, I love the old jazz singers that would sing – you know, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole – and I have their names in one of my songs on the album. So when it’s time to listen to that and then Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee… all the great Christmas songs.There’s so many.
I guess, you know, I just thought that it would be really challenging to write something even coming as close as to those great standards. But what we ended up doing, me and Gina, just coming up with sort of a more a slightly modern-day take on some of our themes and our own experiences from Christmases.
And so I think this album, since Gina and I grew up in like the seventies and eighties, it kinda has that feel to it to me. Like you can picture Christmases from that era as you’re listening to these songs.
For sure. I’m also picking up on some country, some Cajun, a little folk, some classic swing. Do musical styles play a role when you’re writing or are you thinking more lyrically? Or is it about the vibes more than anything else?
Well, you know, I really didn’t approach this any differently than I do to writing my other songs, which is pretty much every song that starts to present itself with an idea, like a lyric idea. It kinda, the song itself, sort of starts dictating what genre it might be and what groove it might have.
And so I never try to make a song like sound a certain way. I just let the song sound the way it wants to. And that’s kinda why the genres are all over the place on this album. It’s really the Christmas theme, or the holiday theme, that’s tying everything together.
That’s the way I write everything and it’s kinda fun. And the cool thing about Christmas music is you will find it’s every genre.
Yeah. You cover a lot of moods, too. You got a kid’s excitement for the season, wistful sadness, even homelessness. Could you say more about that track?
Yeah, you know, I feel like that album starts out with that feeling of what it’s like to have like what Christmas is like for a lot of kids. I have really good memories of my Christmases, luckily. I had a great family and we would always have Christmas all together.
I have three brothers and one sister and so I’ve got, of course, memories of all those Christmases and and so it sort of starts out from like maybe the way that feels like as a kid and then kinda moves into, you know, there’s some little bit of nostalgic stuff looking back and then some romantic stuff and just getting into…
Like I wrote a song about Christmas in New Orleans, which was actually the first Christmas that I spent away from home. And so then that’s kinda like a progression in life, where you stop going home and spending Christmas with your mom and dad and your brothers and sisters and everyone starts having their own families and Christmas changes.
And then I have a couple of songs about spending Christmas alone, which I’ve experienced that myself and I know a lot of people that have. And I think that probably there’s more people out there that don’t have good Christmases.
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You know, I think sometimes when writing about a season for which so many people have so many powerful memories, you can sort of feel the pressure of the classics, I guess. You have some of these songs like “White Christmas” and you almost wonder, well, how can I sort of approximate that similar power…
You know, when you have some of these Christmas songs, they’re the kind of songs that if you were to hear ’em for the first time and you hadn’t heard ’em played over and over and over again, they would knock you back. And some of these songs on this album, they’re truly powerful.
And I was gonna ask how much your own experiences were driving what you got here, and it sounds like a lot. It sounds like there’s a whole lot of recounting your personal memories here.
Yeah, for sure. Well I guess I don’t know any other way of writing a song than infusing it with at least some experiences of my own or other people’s that I’ve known. So yeah. It’s kinda, I think, the only way to write a good song.
Do you have a favorite on the album?
I’ve got a few. Like you said, there’s different moods.
I’d say like my favorite sad one is “Just One Stocking.” And as far as my favorite fun, groovy one, it would have to be “Cruisin’ in Santa’s Sleigh,” which is more like a kid’s kind of song. It’s the R&B one and kind of groovy.
And then I’m finding that a lot of people… The cult classic could perhaps be “Oh Cheeseball.”
