Culture Memories of Christmas past inspire Catherine Maclellan album, tour
If ever there was an East Coast voice meant for singing Christmas songs, it’s Catherine Maclellan’s. Her sound is at once both delicate and strong, with the grace of gently falling snowflakes, able to convey nostalgia without ignoring the bittersweet undertone that memories can carry. It’s the perfect blend for her first seasonal release Holiday, which is accompanied by her Catherine Maclellan & Friends Christmas shows this coming week in Charlottetown, Halifax and Lunenburg.
The award-winning singer will be joined by fellow islanders Tanya Davis and Nick Gauthier, and Windsor’s own Terra Spencer for an evening of songs, stories, and special memories, like the ones Maclellan recalls growing up in a musical home as the daughter of Canadian folk and country icon Gene Maclellan.
“Our house was always filled with music,” she says in a video call from her home studio. “My dad’s best friend was Marty Reno, for a lot of years we spent multiple Christmases with them. In fact, one of Marty’s daughters is Tara Maclean, who a lot of people would know, so we grew up like sisters.
“But her actual sister Shaye, during one of those Christmases when I was six years old and she was a bit older, she told me Santa’s not real. So I have a lot of memories of a lot of people being around, and a lot of kids and a lot of music.”
Maclellan says her earliest Christmas musical memories were of the hymns and carols her family sang in church, represented on her new Holiday album by In the Bleak Midwinter from a poem by Christina Rossetti set to music by Gustav Holst.
But some of the most vivid images that come to mind date back to around the time she was 10 years old, and making new friends after her family moved to P.E.I.
“Every Christmas Eve we would go to our next door neighbours’, to my best friend Tanya Davis’s house, and her mom has a huge Acadian family. They would all arrive on Christmas Eve, in preparation for the Catholic mass, and we would all go over there for lots of dips and meatballs and snacks and cakes, and most of all, singing.
“Just hours and hours of singing Christmas carols around the piano.”
Maclellan and Davis will relive some of those memories, and create new ones with Spencer and Gauthier, at Charlotetown’s Trailside Music Hall on Wednesday, Nov. 24 and Thursday, Nov. 25, the Stage @ St. Andrew’s in Halifax on Friday, Nov. 26 and the Lunenburg Opera House on Saturday, Nov. 27.
She’s looking forward to being in a room together with everyone after meeting up on Zoom to work out the music for the shows, arranging group singalongs as well as solo numbers.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done a Christmas show alone, because that sounds really sad. I love collaboration, especially around these shows, and pretty much six months into the pandemic I realized I was missing my friends and my musical family, so I just stopped doing solo shows for the most part and I’ve only done various collaborations.
“Tanya and I have done a number of collaborations over the years, at Valentine’s Day or whenever, and Terra and I did a show last summer that was really great. Nick just moved home from Ottawa, so I’ve been getting to play a lot of music with him.”
One of the highlights will be Maclellan’s new song Calling You Home (For the Holidays), which she jokes that it feels like a Christmas song because it has a diminished chord in it. Like another Holiday track, the Judy Garland classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, it was inspired by a time when loved ones couldn’t be together, although in this case it was because of COVID-19 travel restrictions last year instead of the Second World War.
“I was feeling really far from a lot of people I would normally be sitting around a table feasting with, friends and family alike,” she says. “Even our family at Christmas was kind of divided up and we didn’t even all get to sit together.
“And that’s totally fine, that’s just where we were last year. Hopefully this year is a little bit different.”
For fans of her father Gene’s music, Maclellan has a Christmas gift in store with the upcoming reissue of his selftitled debut album for the first time in decades. Due out in early 2022, the Gene Maclellan album includes his original recording of his signature composition Snowbird — which became an international hit for Anne Murray — and his singles The Call and Thorn in My Shoe.
Recorded in Nashville in 1970 with Halifax-born producer Brian Ahern, the songs on Gene Maclellan haven’t been available to purchase since the 1997 release of the now-rare Lonesome River CD compilation, and they’ll also be posted online for all to hear.
“My dad’s music has never been available digitally, and I’m super-pumped to have fresh vinyl, and the test pressings sound so good,” says Maclellan, who paid tribute to her father’s songs on her 2017 album If It’s Alright With You. “But I’m really excited about the accessibility of his versions of his songs being available to stream on all the platforms.
“That has never happened before. You could never stream my dad singing Snowbird on Spotify until just the other day.”