` The Thanksgiving Song'
Tulsa native Ben Rector stirs up original ode to Turkey Day for his first Christmas album
Ben Rector's first Christmas album doesn't start out like other yuletide collections.
“My wife really doesn't like to listen to Christmas music until after Thanksgiving, and I knew that if I was going to release a Christmas record, it was going to have to come out before Thanksgiving because you just can't wait that long. I was like, `Maybe I can put a Thanksgiving song on it, and that would kind of like bridge the gap,'” he said.
“I kept being like, `Maybe I just don't know about it and there's a bunch of Thanksgiving albums.' But apparently, there are not. … It's so funny to me because I feel, like especially in America, Thanksgiving is probably more universal. ... Not everybody celebrates Christmas and pretty much everybody celebrates Thanksgiving. I was like, it's wild that Christmas has an entire genre of music — it's like a type of music — and there's not like even a Thanksgiving song.”
So, the Tulsa native opened his seven-song “A Ben Rector Christmas” with “The Thanksgiving Song,” an affecting original piano ballad about gathering the family for good food and memories because “we've made it through / I do believe / the longest year in history.”
“I think anytime there's shared experience or nostalgia or something to tap into, that's when a song can be really powerful, when it's like, `Oh my gosh, that's the way that I feel.' ... I'm just surprised there's not more Thanksgiving music because there's many people and there's so much nostalgia,” Rector said in a phone interview this week.
“I wasn't trying to make it super emotional or anything; I think maybe it was just kind of a tender moment in (our) life: We've got three kids, and our parents are getting older. It's just interesting to watch families evolve.”
Unique year
Even before the coronavirus pandemic largely brought live music tours to a standstill, the hitmaking independent pop singer-songwriter was expecting to travel less in 2020. Over the summer, he and wife Hillary, both 33, celebrated the birth of their twin sons, Roy and Robert. The boys, now 4 months old, have a big sister, Jane, 3.
“Fortunately, there's not a ton of moving parts as far as my professional world right now … but it's a wild time at the Rector household,” the Oklahoma native said from his home in
Nashville, Tennessee.
“We're not really a missing a ton because the world has slowed down a bunch, and on that level, it's really good. But on the other level, it feels a little bit like `Groundhog Day' ... with small children — babies anyway, but then adding that into a pandemic, there's almost no markers for time in a weird way.”
When the pandemic started and he realized his few tour plans would be scrapped, Rector said he wanted to use his time wisely.
“I've wanted to make a Christmas record for a long time, and I just haven't really ended up doing it because usually I haven't had the time to record and kind of put it all together and build a campaign around it,” Rector said. “This year, I was like, `This is the perfect time to do it.' All of my friends who
are great players who would be great on this record are here, and I can carve out some time.”
Christmas classics
Due out Nov. 13, “A Ben Rector Christmas” features his joyful renditions of yuletide favorites like “The Christmas Song” “Frosty the Snowman” and “Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas.” His manager suggested he pen some originals for the holiday album, but Rector said writing original Christmas songs is harder than it sounds.
“I think that people don't understand how good Christmas music is because they're so used to it. But it's actually like the greatest hits of the last hundred years.
... I just couldn't come up with a new angle or anything to say about Christmas that I felt like hadn't been said already. So, I started thinking, `What if I try to write a Thanksgiving song?'” Rector said.
“When the song came together ... I was like, `Man, what if this could become like THE Thanksgiving song?' As soon as we recorded it, we felt like it was very good.”
Visual feast
Like dressing with turkey, Rector felt “The Thanksgiving Song” needed a festive visual accompaniment, but between the twins and the pandemic, putting together a music video seemed impossible. But Brian Shutters, who has worked on Rector's lyric videos in the past, had an idea for a new one that would incorporate the stirring lyrics into Thanksgiving food prep.
“When he sent it to me, I was blown away,” Rector said. “I texted him
... `Did you for real make all that stuff? Is some of it CGI?' And he was like, `No, it's all real props.' I truly cannot imagine how long it took him.”
Although Rector and his wife typically spend their holidays alternating between her family in Waco, Texas, and his family in Tulsa, he said this will be their first year to celebrate at home in Nashville because of the twins.
But the memories of Oklahoma holidays past will be strong enough he can almost taste them.
“Growing up in Tulsa, Christmas Eve we would always … eat like appetizers for dinner. A lot of them ended it being cheese-based appetizers. Not exclusively that, but it was just kind of like fun appetizer food. But I feel like still when I think of Little Smokies — you know what I'm talking about? Like the tiny hot dogs — that makes me think of Christmas,” Rector said with a chuckle.