A Christmas Album by Amy Grant which includes songs like Emmanuel and Angels We Have Heard On High

An outstanding Christmas album...

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Though this album has been around for a while (since 1983), it hasn't aged as poorly as some of Grant's other albums from that era. This one remains a true classic and one of my favorites each Christmas season.

What makes this album rise to the top is that it contains several songs that I've never heard elsewhere (naturally because some of them were co-written by Grant herself for this album). In fact, my least favorite tracks on the album are the traditional Christmas tunes like "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and "Sleigh Ride," which turn out as rather pedestrian, if perfectly tolerable, efforts here.

In contrast, the highlights of this album include songs like "Praise the King," "Little Town," "Christmas Hymn" and "Heirlooms." These cuts are priceless, and I enjoy listening to this album every year. If you only want to hear retreads of the classic Christmas stuff, then you might not like this album. But if you're interested in hearing unique Christmas music interspersed between some of the standard fare, then I'm happy to recommend Amy Grant's "A Christmas Album."

A Perennial Favorite That Pointed Grant in Pop/Rock Direction

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In the spring of 1982, around the time that her soon-to-be widely successful album Age to Age was released, Amy Grant was asked whether she would be interested in crossing over from the contemporary Christian music (CCM) market to a more mainstream market. She responded in the affirmative. Her next release was A Christmas Album in the fall of 1983. Grant has said in interviews over the years that she wanted this album to quell the high expectations raised by her considerable recent success. But whatever her intentions might have been, the album actually did the opposite: it increased her fan base and carried her farther down a pop/rock path that would a mere year-and-a-half later culminate in her first dual release (1985's Unguarded) to the secular pop/contemporary Christian market.

For a holiday release, A Christmas Album is a remarkably excellent album. The formula used by Grant and producer Brown Bannister is nothing new: stir in new tunes with the expected traditional favorites and include a few instrumentals. With the holiday classics (both religious and secular), Grant provides renditions respectful of the originals while often adding her own twists to the proceedings. This in itself fit well with the CCM target audience's worship practices of the time. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, it was standard (in larger evangelical churches, at least) to take traditional hymns or songs and embellish them with brassy orchestras, large choirs, and, often, more contemporary vocals and arrangements.

But even in following this trend, Grant's versions are of markedly higher quality than what you'd normally find on a CCM album of the time. She stretches her voice on "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" and "Angels We Have Heard on High" and towers over the voices of the choir that backs her. She includes a new song from her own pen, "Christmas Hymn," that aims to become a Christmas standard of its own. This "hymn" is the best track on the album and has been picked up by some churches as part of their worship. (A second new Christian song, "Heirlooms," is pleasant enough but not as memorable.)

Grant's versions of secular Christmas songs like "Sleigh Ride" and "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts)" not only serve as tributes to the original recordings but also bring a sense of fun to the album. In the same vein, Grant's collaboration with then-husband Gary Chapman, "Tennessee Christmas," is as all-American as the previous tunes. When you factor in the album's cover snow scenes and interior photo of Grant's extended family gathering, it's not that much of a stretch to say that Grant comes across here as all American as the individuals in a Norman Rockwell painting.

If the album had just been composed of Christmas standards and new tunes in the traditional mode, it undoubtedly would have succeeded in Grant's goal of deflating expectations. Bannister and Grant also, though, have planted a few left turns in the album. The most obvious one is Michael W. Smith's "Emmanuel," a song that, despite its name, is not specifically Christmas-oriented. (Smith stole the lyrics from a top-selling poster of the names of Christ.) Sandwiched between traditional hymns, "Emmanuel" begins with heavy synthesizers and quickly expands into a full-blown pop/rock tune. It quickly became a CCM hit single and remained a concert standard for some time after Grant "crossed over" into the secular market. The second pop song, "Love Has Come," is sandwiched between "Christmas Hymn" and "Sleigh Ride." The backing vocals from secular pop/rock band Chicago's Bill Champlin provide a harder edge than had been heard in Grant's songs to date, even though "Love Has Come" is not nearly as hard-driving as "Emmanuel."

In fact, both "Emmanuel" and "Love Has Come" easily could have fit on Grant's next studio album, Straight Ahead (released just a few months later in early 1984). That album features pop/rock tunes at the same musical level as A Christmas Album: far beyond anything on the mostly mellow Age to Age's plate and with hints of Unguarded's full-blown technopop. A Christmas Album, then, contains the first signs of Amy Grant's coming transition from CCM superstar to secular pop artist.

But beyond any considerations of its place in Amy Grant's career, A Christmas Album is an excellent album in its own right. Even more than two decades later, its production quality is excellent, thanks to the sterling work of producer Bannister. (The closest CCM Christmas album to this one in spirit is Steven Curtis Chapman's The Music of Christmas, which was also helmed by Bannister.) Grant has released two additional Christmas albums in the succeeding years, but it's this one that's fondly remembered. Many people put it in rotation every Christmas season and even throughout the year.