Remastered Carpenters Christmas Album Available Now

A&M/UMe celebrates the upcoming holidays in a merry big way with the release of the Carpenters’ Christmas Once More, an all-new Christmas collection featuring 16 timeless Carpenters holiday classics personally curated by Richard Carpenter. This newly remixed and remastered 16-track set includes perennial Carpenters holiday favorites such as “Sleigh Ride,” “(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays,” Richard's own “Merry Christmas, Darling” featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and many more.

All 16 tracks, which have been culled from the Carpenters’ most cherished holiday albums, are available now in multiple formats, including CD, black vinyl, limited-edition gold vinyl, digital download, streaming, and ATMOS. 

Building upon the grand traditions of Christmas songs and holiday-themed albums recorded by legendary artists like Enrico Caruso ("O Holy Night"), Bessie Smith ("At the Christmas Ball"), Bing Crosby ("White Christmas"), Perry Como ("Home for the Holidays") and Frank Sinatra (Christmas Songs By 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.

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. Now comes Christmas Once More, a 16-track best-of compilation from all the duo’s holiday platters. Whichever way you shake the music box, Richard and Karen’s Christmas Once More is richly satisfying.

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