New Carpenters Holiday Collection, ‘Christmas Once More,’ Due

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Carpenters will be the subject of an all-new Christmas collection featuring 16 timeless holiday classics personally curated by Richard Carpenter. Carpenters’ Christmas Once More, a newly remixed and remastered 16-track set, culled from their most cherished holiday albums, includes perennial seasonal favorites such as “Sleigh Ride,” “(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It arrives November 1, 2024, via A&M/UMe, on CD or 2-LPs and is available for pre-order in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.

From the September 10 announcement: Building upon the grand traditions of Christmas songs and holiday-themed albums recorded by legendary artists like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Karen and Richard Carpenter set out to make their own first seasonal LP in 1978 titled Christmas Portrait. Richard had a unique idea for creating a near-continuous work that would mix hymns, pop tunes, vocals, and instrumentals into a more flowing, inventive medley style. In effect, the Carpenters came up with a modernized sound tapestry in which old and new traditions followed one another in surprising and pleasing ways. Their concept of making Christmas albums artfully reflected the eclectic ways American audiences experienced the season and its joyful music in the years when the Carpenters’ generation was growing up.

Listen to an earlier presentation of “Sleigh Ride”

The key to the Carpenters’ Christmas sound would be found by way of the excellence in their orchestral arrangements. Richard Carpenter did some of them himself, while others were assigned to the gifted Peter Knight, who had collaborated with Carpenters before, as well as to the estimable veteran Billy May.

Yet all these innovative arrangements would be for naught without a consummate and versatile lead vocalist to perform the Christmas songs Richard had selected with emotion, vitality, poignance, and/or glee — and that’s where Karen Carpenter truly made her mark. Her amazing voice was able to convey the many moods and multiple emotions of Christmas — from the joy of Nativity to the glow of intimate reunion — in ways no one else could. The voice that made songs like “Close To You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” indelibly popular anthems of romantic love now brought a spiritual clarity and immediacy to hymns and carols like “Christ Is Born.” Karen’s instinctive vocal sensibility would also transform Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” into something more like a prayer, as well as enable “Ave Maria” to sound more akin to a tribute to one’s own sainted mother.

“With Karen’s marvelous leads,” Richard has written, “combined with an oversize studio orchestra and chorus, terrific arrangements, and timeless music, Christmas Portrait was, and is, an almost incomparable Christmas album.” For his part, Richard would downplay his own contributions to Christmas Portrait, even suggesting it should have been billed and released as a Karen Carpenter solo album — but he was the one who conceived, produced, and saw this innovative project all the way through to its splendid completion. In fact, it’s Richard’s voice that begins the proceedings on Christmas Once More, with his twelve-voice, multi-overdubbed arrangement of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” leading into “Happy Holiday,” a song that ends on F# above middle-C — the exact same note Karen then sings to begin the irresistible “Christmas Waltz.” Observed Richard, “I like to connect these things when I can.”

Enough material was recorded during the Christmas Portrait sessions in 1978 to allow for the eventual release of a second Carpenters holiday album, An Old-Fashioned Christmas, in 1984, a year after Karen’s death, and it too was an international hit. Soon after, Christmas Portrait – The Special Edition combined tracks from both Carpenters’ seasonal LPs with some additional material for a sort of super-anthology that became yet another holiday perennial.

Carpenters’ Christmas Once More Track Listing
1. It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
2. Happy Holiday
3. The Christmas Waltz
4. Sleigh Ride
5. It’s Christmas Time / Sleep Well, Little Children
6. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
7. Christ Is Born
8. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
9. Merry Christmas, Darling (RPO Version)
10. The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)
11. (There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays
12. Little Altar Boy
13. The First Snowfall / Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
14. My Favorite Things
15. White Christmas
16. Ave Maria

The definitive biography of one of the most enduring musical groups from the ’70s was told for the first time from the perspective of Richard Carpenter, in a 2021 book, Carpenters: The Musical Legacy. It’s available here.