12 Days of Wintertide - Day 8

Christmas for Cowboys

"Tall in the saddle, he spends Christmas Day
Driving the cattle over snow covered plains
All of the good gifts given today
His is the sky and the wide open range..."

Back when I was walking the aisles of that great library I once mentioned--the library of Christmas songs--looking for my cover songs to include on Wintertide,
"Christmas for Cowboys" caught my eye. I jotted this title down on my first list of song possibilities, and then the second list, and then the third... This song made it onto every list of potential songs I wanted to record, and it then sailed through my final choices. It made the final cut without hesitation.

I love this song.

I love this painting of a life well-lived in simple yet beautiful moments, trading a "football and eggnog and Christmas parades" Christmas for one spent hard at work on the "wide open range".

Simple beauty.

In "Christmas for Cowboys", it's the blanketed plains and the cattle themselves. A small, toasty campfire and the starry sky overhead. The quiet of the night and the voice of the wind. These are gifts to the cowboy--these are gifts to us, and they are as loving and grand as anything under the Christmas tree. They are enough.

The mountains around my home are lightly dusted over right now, but soon they'll be snow-covered like the cowboy's plains. I always look forward to the snow. The days are getting shorter and darker, but when it snows, the moon has something to reflect on--brightening the dreariness of gray, cold, too-short days. The stars will shine all the brighter, and looking up through the evergreen trees on the mountain, they will indeed be our "Christmas tree lights"...

This Christmas I want to be more on the lookout for these kinds of gifts, stepping away from the noise and removing everything else but the beauty so I can see how deep that beauty goes. If you come across such a gift this season, I would love to hear about it.

"Christmas for Cowboys" was written by Steve Weisberg and first recorded and released by John Denver in 1975. It's a song I've heard every year my entire life. Sometimes I choose to record a cover song purely because I love it, and I do love this song so much; but also keeping a songwriter alive in some small way in the songs they wrote... That is truly an honor.


Until next week...

All the love,
Brittany

12 Days of Wintertide - Day 7

Day 7: That Night

Remember when we stayed up through the night
Waiting for the satin northern lights?
We were too young to know
We’d never see them through a window frame of snow

We lay beneath the tree
In the living room, you and me
Looking through boughs at a thousand colored lights
That was our aurora that night...

When I was little, there were a few years where we got our Christmas tree at the very last second--on Christmas Eve. While I love the idea of getting a tree early and enjoying it for the days and weeks leading up to December 25th, there is something very sweet about a Christmas Eve tree. Finding a tree farm that is still open, everyone bundling up to go (because the whole family has to go, right?), finding and voting on the best tree (or at least a Charlie Brown tree that needs a home), the rushing about to find the boxes of ornaments in the attic and the garage, untangling all the lights and decorating with the Christmas music playing just shy of "as loud as possible", and then piling onto the couches to watch one more Christmas movie before bed while the tree shines by the stairs...

Forgive me for waxing a bit nostalgic... but I do love a Christmas Eve tree.

One of those years, after the tree was decorated and sparkling, my family all went to the kitchen to make popcorn and hot chocolate--everyone getting ready to watch either A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life, and I ran upstairs for blankets and pillows. When I came back down, I found my brother laying under the tree.

It struck me as rather funny, and I laughed as I asked him what he was doing.

"Looking at all the lights," he grinned.

He said I should see them, so seven or eight-year-old me dropped the armful of blankets and pillows and laid down to see what he saw. To this day, silly as it may look, this is still one of my favorite Christmas tree things--looking up through the branches at the lights.

While this is the final snapshot and the final moment in the song, this memory from so many years ago was the beginning of "That Night".
The very last lines were the first written.

All the love,
Brittany

12 Days of Wintertide - Day 6

The Band & Christmas in Killarney

So let's see, what haven't we talked about yet...

Oh! Oh, boy. The musicians. Allow me to introduce you to a few more of the incredible people who helped me make this album.

Joel Key (all the beautiful guitars), Aubrey Haynie (fiddle and mandolin), David Smith (upright bass), Wayne Killius (percussion), Garth Justice (percussion), Chip Davis (background vocals), Billy Davis (background vocals), and John Nicholson (engineer)--it is always an honor to watch and listen to these guys work. The experience of handing them one of my song demos and watching them become composers right along with me to transform that song into everything you hear...
It never gets old. World-class craftsmen, every one of them.

They all know each other so well that most of the time I'm just trying to keep up with them and decode any shorthand and studio lingo before the music starts.

I've learned so much from working with these artists.

They've also given me so many stories...

Some of my all-time favorite moments in the studio were all the behind-the-scenes of "Christmas in Killarney".

Before recording a song, we always listen to the demo first. The demos are recordings of just me and my guitar, setting down the framework and a place to start. While listening, there's usually discussion about who might take which solos, about the turns, about little changes to chords and counts, about possible melodic themes and the dynamic, heart-of-the-song moments...

When we started listening to the demo for "Christmas in Killarney", suddenly everyone was talking about Irish pubs and what it's like playing in Ireland. (And I, for one, was wishing we could all be magically transported there. I'd love to play in Ireland... Someday.) This song was one where we didn't have to talk about it too much. It's a more familiar Christmas song, but we were also all on the same page from the start.

We wanted to sound like we were playing in a hole-in-the-wall place in Dublin.

The fiddle solo lines, the guitar strumming throughout, the dipping bass notes, the vocal harmonies, the washboard moment, the drums, the second ending...!

(The second ending was my mom's idea. She whispered to me halfway through the recording that everyone should come back in and the song shouldn't end yet. So if you love that second ending as much as I do, let her know. We've gotta give her a whole lotta credit! :) )

When someone asked about adding handclaps, Joel responded with, "Yeah, we could use a little more racket."

Racket.

Never before have I wanted "racket" in a recording, but watching Joel and Wayne add the layered tracks of clapping together--that was a racket. Since everyone purposely avoided sticking too strictly with the beat instrumentally, we didn't want the clapping to be too uniform either. So Wayne kept fake-clapping to throw Joel off the beat and off of wherever Wayne would actually clap. Though of course he knew what he was doing, it was a funny picture--the percussionist not knowing where or how to clap.

And all that "racket" makes the song.


I love these guys, and I am so grateful for and humbled by their beautiful work on Wintertide.


-BJ

Release Day ❄️

Day 5: Album Release

Last year was... stormy. For so many reasons that you already know about.
After losing over forty shows in 2020 and struggling with how to deal with that, I was encouraged to focus on what I could do. So I turned my attention to the Christmas album I've always wanted to create but hadn't had the time for yet. I couldn't control the gigs being canceled left and right, but writing, recording, and building a new album... By the Lord's grace, these things I could do.

I am delighted to announce that my Christmas album, Wintertide, is now available!

I am so excited to share it with you! You can purchase the album on my website, and it is also available on all of the streaming platforms--Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music.... (Just a note on the streaming options, only nine of the fifteen songs will be available on these platforms--all of the originals and two of the covers.) If you do stream the album, it would mean so much to me if you'd share it with someone!

Album Art

Oh, let's talk about the artwork--is it not gorgeous?!

When I asked my sister Angelina if she would be willing to create the album art for Wintertide, I knew whatever she came up with would be beautiful. She is an incredible artist, and I can't tell you how thrilled I was when she said "yes"!

I found a few photos for inspiration, trying to give her somewhere to start, but to be honest, I just showed her pictures of snowy watercolor trees. I also shared some of the lyrics from "Wintertide" (the song) and "Call Me North". She took the few meager things I gave her and came up with this beauty! When she sent me the first preview, I thought, "That's it! It's perfect!" I didn't realize it was just a rough draft or that this preview was at a smaller scale. I didn't see how it could get any better than that!

These paintings wrap around the entire album. As you open it up, there is more to see, and if you open it up all the way, the images flow all the way across the front and back. The forest greens and grays, the misty trees, that cabin, the deep blues, all the kindly, wild, free creatures... I just love it. I hope you love it too.

Thank you, Angelina, for your beautiful work.

Oh, one more thing. Fun fact: when Angelina shared the final draft, I noticed the wolf on one of the panels... All of the other animals in the artwork are mentioned in the album, but there were no wolves in any of the songs. Since I had a couple more songs to write at the time, I managed to tie howling wolves into one.
See if you notice... Listen for the wolves.


All the love,
Brittany


P.S. Psst...
Make sure to stop by @bjeanmusic on Instagram to enter the giveaway that's going on over there...

12 Days of Wintertide - Day 4

Day 4: Writer's Block

In a conversation with my favorite co-writer, I told him about all the time I've been spending in Paris lately (reading Les Miserables... which... takes even longer to read when you're reading it ten minutes at a time) and the glimmerings of a new song idea. This song wouldn't be a Christmas song--it would be for some other future project, and I wanted to call it... well, I still might write it, so I'll leave that for another day.

At the time I was suffering the great panic of writer's block. If you've seen the movie "The Man Who Invented Christmas", imagine Charles Dickens sitting at his desk, staring into space with wild eyes and blank pages before him. Everything he goes through in that film is what writer's block feels like. With the pressure of looming deadlines and passing days, writer's block is like being the owner of an empty well, and instead of digging a new one somewhere else or noticing a friend standing next to you offering you a glass of water from their well, unable to look away, you stare and sink into the dark well directly before you. Dramatic, I know, but finding a rounded idea that takes ahold of you at such a time--when you start to wonder if you'll ever write another word in your life--is a comforting relief. To put it mildly.

(Of course, if you ever struggle with writer's block, I don't recommend staring into the emptiness. It's an easy thing to fall into, but for me, I've found the answer usually lies in lifting my eyes to look around and outward. It lies in doing something or tryingsomething different. Going somewhere new, hiking, finding a new place to write--it could be a mile up a mountain path or as close as the backyard, free-writing about anything at all without the pressures of a finished shine, having conversations and listening deeply, leaning into other writers for support... Which brings us back to that original conversation.)

Next thing I knew, I had a song with "Paris" in the title waiting for me in my inbox.

My first, knee-jerk reaction was to be a little miffed because someone else had written my song.

Then I read the lyrics and found it wasn't what I was expecting at all. It wasn't the song I'd been talking about. It was something else, and I quickly fell in love with the lovely, lonely night in the story. After reading it a few times, I took Bellamy out of his case and began the hunt for the melody. Now the only thing I'm upset about is that I didn't write it! (Well, other than a handful of words.)

This song also broke the writer's block. It helped me turn my focus, and it took some of the self-made pressure off because I knew we would have at least one song for that upcoming recording session.

"For Paris" was one of my favorites to bring to the studio. The short intro sets you on the streets of Paris, passing by musicians at a corner cafe... The steady acoustic guitar finding its moments, the mandolin sparkling throughout, the violin in harmony, the cymbal swell and soft brushes... Our musicians found the sound.

I would like to live in this song. And I can say that since I didn't write it.

And I'll revisit that other idea at some point, but this is my song about Paris.

Thank you, Allan James, for this gift.

All the love,
Brittany

P.S.
Wintertide
Available November 12

We're one week away...

12 Days of Wintertide - Day 3

Day 3: Christmas Wonder

My niece told me recently that she likes how this song that has "Christmas" in the title never actually mentions Christmas in the lyrics. My response to her giggles was a laugh of my own and a soft, "Well... not by name."

"Christmas Wonder" began with wonderings about the very first Christmas, and it is full of whisperingly strange things. Moments that are out of the ordinary and yet not wildly spectacular enough to be completely unmissable. Little things that need to be watched for to be seen. Small moments of the day.

A silent and mysterious ringing in the air, the typically quiet ponies racing through the canyon as if they don't want to be late for something, walking into a warm room that should be shockingly cold since the fire hasn't been started yet, strangers asking for directions and bringing curious and unheard-before questions with them, the move to help someone who sorely needs it--someone who may have gone unnoticed another day...

"And the ponies come to mind..."

In my first notes for this song, I knew without a doubt that we needed the ponies. (You can ask my co-writer--I was quite adamant they be included no matter what.) They are a recurring thread that ties these small wonders together. Their wild, early-morning rush is one of the first unusual things noted, and later, with an act of kindness, they come back to mind. The ponies' unusual fieriness is tied to this second "unusual" kindness by rock-solid and yet unexplainable motivation. 

And then there are the yearlings in the end. Being only a year old, you wouldn't expect playful, sprightly yearlings to stand still for too long, and yet, here they do. They are stone-still in their yard, looking up with an anticipation that would make one ask,
"What are we waiting for?"

"Christmas Wonder" is a quiet prelude to Christmas Day.
It is a simple prologue to the true wonder that followed.
It is that moment just before everything. 

All the love, 

Brittany

P.S. My (wonderful, kind, beautiful) sister, Jenelle, is running an album release tour for me as we prepare to send Wintertide into the wilds.

The release will be on November 12 and the tour will run through November 26.

We're looking for people willing to share on IG, FB, Twitter, your blog, newsletter, really anywhere. We will do all the work for you and send you graphics and info--it will be very simple, I promise.
(There will also be a giveaway during this window... details coming soon.)

If you would be willing to help spread the word and would like to join the tour, just fill out this form: https://forms.gle/Lo6qyH1hpHo8eY1HA

And thank you!!