Grace released her second EP of Holiday favorites, “A Time for Christmas, Vol. 2” in time for the 2022 season. “I’m obsessed with Christmas. So everyone always said you’re gonna have to make a Christmas album someday but as we know, albums are expensive and albums are a really big project.” During the pandemic, Grace was eager to record something and her husband suggested making an EP. It would be an impossible task to narrow down her favorites, so the idea of a series was born. “I would love to get a volume five and I would love to have a collection of them.”
Keeping in mind that this would be a longer-term project Grace needed to be savvy about song selection. “I didn’t want every single song that was my favorite Christmas song on Vol. 1 or Vol. 2 because I need to keep some of them… there’s a structure that kind of accidentally happened and I’m going to try to on purpose continue with throughout the other ones.”
One of Grace’s favorite songs was “O Holy Night.” She shares that the “love affair” with that particular song began years ago and that she “never felt such responsibility singing a song every single Christmas.” The song was lost to Grace for a time. “Unfortunately, I went through a period in my life where I lost the ability to sing. The hardest thing in the world was not being able to sing this. I found out I had the beginning of a vocal nodule at one point and I was due to record this for my mom as a Christmas present. I decided I’ll go ahead and do it anyway. It’s a recording I’ve not listened to ever since but I’m very proud I did it. It was very emotional like that was the price I paid for her and she knew that I had stopped singing for about six months. So that was the last thing I did… When I was back singing and back full voice again, it was the song that I got back up there singing.” When it came time for the album, Grace’s mom sponsored the recording of the track making the experience even more meaningful. “It’s her favorite song and she is just absolutely delighted that she could finally listen to it whenever she wants.”
The EP has Grace covering two of Lauren Daigle’s songs, “Noel” and “Christmas Past,” that push the crossover boundaries. “I always thought that the music I listened to had to kind of keep separate from the music I sing… It’s so weird how scared those of us who are classically trained are.” Grace shared she often would immediately decline requests for certain songs because they weren’t classical, or weren’t in her key, or written for her voice type but she has learned more and more that these things simply don’t matter. “What we’re all drawn to on day one is probably telling a story. We all want to entertain and tell a story and we’ve got something within us that we want to get out. We got training to make our voices come out as beautifully as possible, but we do have to try and look back into the person before the training… I know a lot of people have worked on that to try and go, ‘Okay, well, where does this journey start’? Then perhaps maybe you need to go back to that person and not get so caught up in all of the rules.”
This will lead to further exploration for Grace in the future. “I am toying with the idea of trying out some different sounds next year [2023].” She is eager to find the right kind of sound for approaching popular material. “I think as a classical crossover singer you have to be very careful how you handle well-known contemporary music… You’re trying to get people in who may not necessarily be part of the classical world. It can be quite frightening to hear really high operatic notes… We’re kind of these strange beings that do these odd things with our bodies to make this produced sound. So I’m conscious of having a less produced sound than I have had. That’s easier for me in the lower range, it’s much harder in the high range.. my plans for next year are trying to figure out how to hone it down a little bit more.”
“A Time for Christmas, Vol. 2” ends with the famed “White Christmas” which Grace said was “very symbolic of just wanting a future that’s a bit brighter… It’s a crazy world right now and the thought of a white Christmas to me was the hope of the future.”
Stream “A Time for Christmas, Vol. 2” on Spotify now!
Purchase a physical copy of Vol 31 now!
