Melissa Carper Delivers 'A Very Carper Christmas'
(Brooklyn Basement) Austin-based singer-songcrafter/upright bassist Melissa Carper has released her new LP, A Very Carper Christmas, via Soundly Music. On December 4, she will join JD McPherson's upcoming "Socks: A Rock & Roll Christmas" tour, a 15-date run that kicks off in Louisville, Kentucky, with stops planned in Nashville, New York City, Chicago, and more.
A Very Carper Christmas is a fresh collection of future classic holiday songs brimming with equal parts nostalgia, sly humor, and goodwill for all. Carper credits the spark for a Christmas album to her friend Ben Kitterman, who challenged her to pen an album of original holiday compositions. What first felt daunting soon became a passion project. Carper reached out to her long-time friend and old Camptown Ladies bandmate, Gina Gallina, to see if she would be interested in co-writing the album. Barely an hour later, she received an email from Gallina with five witty ideas sketched out. Immediately inspired, Carper began adding melodies and chords to Gallina's lyrics. It was on.
In a weekend of creative alchemy at an Airbnb in Arkansas in the Spring of 2024, they crafted a song cycle that captures all the heartfelt, heartbreaking, and joyous notes of the holiday as many of us experience it today. As Gallina reflects, "Melissa's songs all come from the heart. She don't blow smoke."
With 15 tracks consisting of the Carper-Gallina collaborations, three Carper solo originals, co-writes with Katie Shore and Brennen Leigh, plus two classic covers, Carper headed to Nashville's analog wonderland, The Bomb Shelter, to record. Producers Andrija Tokic and Dennis Couch, Carper, Gallina, and a top-notch troupe of musicians assembled in January 2025 to bring the songs to life. Carper's Austin-based crew (Emily Gimble, Katie Shore, Greg Harkins) joined her Nashville regulars (Dennis Crouch, Chris Scruggs, Jeff Taylor, Chris Gelb, and Doug Corcoran, along with Tim Crouch for twin fiddle duties with Shore), gathering around a Christmas tree borrowed from friend Susan Hamilton to resurrect the holiday spirit. There was even a cheeseball, in homage to Carper's mother's tradition of bringing this classic offering to every yuletide affair.
There's an effervescent nostalgia built into these new songs, with their call-outs to rotary phones and to playing Trivial Pursuit by the tree, sung in Carper's signature croon that harkens back to an even earlier era of holiday classics by Frank Sinatra, Loretta Lynn, and Nat King Cole. But, as Carper incisively diagnoses, "Christmas is a tradition, but it's also a transition," a lens through which we view how life changes from year to year.
A Very Carper Christmas has songs that speak to children's breathless anticipation, to the sorrow of being alone or estranged at the holiday, and to the celebration of connection (or reconnection) with family and friends. "I could say I have experienced all of those things, so it wasn't that hard to write about," Carper says. On this album, she gives us all a voice and a new reason to celebrate the meaning of the holidays. Stream the album here
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