Christmas EP Out Now!

I've been dreaming of recording a Christmas album since I was in high school, and have been slowly accumulating Christmas originals since about 2003. Fast forward to a year or two ago while I was working as an Online Worship Director for a local church during our livestream (pandemic) season. We had a big Christmas worship video shoot planned for Christmas 2020, but COVID spiked days before the shoot and so we had to cancel the whole thing. Not wanting to have a Christmas Eve livestream without any new Christmas music, I recorded a couple worship songs at home, along with some family songs as The Bickerband.

I saved the Logic Pro files for those recordings, thus officially starting at least the scratch tracks to my first Christmas album. Fast forward another year-and-a-half, and my agent Kareen at The Wright Music Division of The Jackson Agency asked for some Christmas music to pitch for those Hallmark movies we all love so much (really, I do...). So I found myself in July recording studio versions of the songs I did at Ecclesia, as well as an original I had recorded a bootleg version of back in 2018, and another original that you will likely never hear on Yonder Breaks channels. (It's too poppy, but I'll release it under another band name.)

I promised myself that I'd finish that Christmas album I've been building all these years, and so around October/November I picked it up again with another classic, and three more originals (one you may have heard as the theme song for the Pumpkin & Nog Vlog, though I recorded an updated version for the EP).

Thought I'm proud of the whole album, most notably to me is the final song, "Green Goes White," which is a song I wrote for my wedding back in 2011. I had been writing songs for about ten years at that point, but didn't really sing. However, I got an idea to sing a song for my new bride at our wedding. Scared to death to sing in front of that many people though, I put the decision to a higher power: I told God that if He gave me a song to sing at the wedding, I'd do it. Well, "Green Goes White" spilled onto the page in minutes, so I guess I was stuck.

I made arrangements to sing the song at our reception, still scared and a little on the fence about it. When the day came I ended up not singing it because we were missing a guitar cable and/or amplifier (if I remember correctly...maybe just an excuse!) Also, the party was bumpin' at the reception, and so I decided to forego singing my sappy love song and bringing everyone down with my slow Christmas-romance song. In hindsight, it was a bad decision, but I tried to make up for it by singing the song to my wife on our first anniversary. Not as epic, I know, but she still enjoyed it; and still does.

And so here we are eleven years later (today! as of the date of publishing), and I've finally recorded a good version of the song, which I think turned out beautifully. My good friend Mike Williams of Palmetto Strings donated the violin track (he was also at the wedding). I feel the need to mention that my wife's favorite color is green (there's a story there, but essentially she says green chose her, not the other way around). As a result, her wedding ring is green, but on our wedding day she donned white, of course, hence the title.

This video was actually shot when a freak snowstorm hit my hometown of Charleston, SC, where it almost never snows. I took the opportunity to record myself (with much longer hair) singing the song, as well as some lovely b-roll of the snow covering what was typically a green yard. So the song that was written eleven years ago, recorded as a video in 2018, and finally made into a studio version in 2022 is finally here on my first Christmas EP! It comes out December 19th, but I'll put it up a day early (our anniversary) on Bandcamp, as well as release this music video for "Green Goes White."

We gave out CDs (remember those?) of our favorite Christmas songs as party favors at our wedding, and I know at least one of these songs would make the playlist if we did it again! Here's hoping one (or all!) of these Christmas songs makes your Holiday playlist.

Happy Christmas!