The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fantasia releases Christmas album, prepares to start tour
R&B singer Fantasia has always loved Christmas thanks to her late grandmother Addie “Cat” Collins.
“Her birthday was on Christmas!” said the R&B singer who won season 3 of “American Idol” 13 years ago. “But she gave all the time. Loving people. Encouraging people. Inspiring people. That is the gift she gave every day. She had the best Christmas tree on the street. Her Christmas tree was the bomb! … She’s playing Christmas music, the lights would be up, the food would be great. We’d sit down, gather by the fireplace and talk and laugh. And the adults would tell us stories (0f ) when they were kids.”
So this year, Fantasia finally recorded a Christmas album “Christmas After Midnight.” (It came out last month.)
And there’s a tour, too, with an unusual twist. She’s hitting bigger venues and pairing them with intimate ones. First up in Atlanta: Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre (capacity: 2,750) on Nov. 26. And the next night: Atlanta’s City Winery (capacity : 310).
“I honestly only wanted to do really small venues,” she said. “When you think jazz artists, you think intimate venues where you have a mic, a piano, a couple of horns and drums. I love watching those shows.”
But demand, she said, was too great: “We had to do bigger places as well because a lot of people want to come to the show.”
The concert will blend Christmas songs and her biggest hits with a jazz feel.
“I was told I couldn’t win ‘Idol,’ ” she said. “I did. I was told I couldn’t do Broadway. I did it. With this tour, I want to embody jazz. I don’t want to dumb it down. … When I leave this earth, the work will speak for me. I want people to say, ‘There’s nothing she couldn’t do!’ Everybody knows I can get on stage and blaze it down. They know I can do that. But they’ve never seen this side of me.”
The album features covers of a wide variety of Christmas classics previously sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Big Mama Thornton.
She has the ability to take any artist’s tune and give it a proper Fantasia jazz/soul spin. “I can do any genre of music,” she said. “We did that on ‘Idol,’ whether it’s church, pop, rock, or whatever. I enjoy doing that. In this case, we didn’t want to change it up too much. We wanted to keep it simple and find the honesty and truth with these cherished records and make it so dope.”
Fantasia, who is married with children, said she is a little wistful about past Christmas days. “A lot of families are broken. They’re not together like they’re used to be. I will be honest. My family is that way. We’re not what we used to be when grandmother was alive. (She passed in 2015.) They detoured and started doing their own things.”
She performs in Atlanta frequently and even lived here for a year. But she loves her family in North Carolina and now resides in Charlotte.
Fantasia tours a lot because that generates income more than actually selling music. But she has written a lot of her own music so she makes money there, as well as from hair products, movies and Broadway.
She chose not to express her actual opinion about 19 Entertainment bringing back “Idol” so soon on ABC. (Virtually every other “Idol” we’ve interviewed in recent months said they thought it was too soon.) “I have a lot of opinions; I tend to keep some of them to myself,” Fantasia said. “I hope they do a very good job.”