It’s a record fans have been begging for for years, and they won’t be disappointed.
Finally It’s Christmasis out now.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You releasedSnowed Inin 1997.
Credit: Jiro Schneider
Why, after all these years, was it time to do another Christmas album?
We had debated a follow-up Christmas album for a long time for a couple reasons.
One, [Snowed In] was actually one of our favorite albums to make.
This is the kind of thing that you don’t just do on autopilot.
It’s has to be special.
It has to have all of the energy and focus of making your next major studio album.
But it gives you so much more work!
[Laughs] So itiswork, it’s been an incredibly full year.
I think I’ve had a cold for six months.
This was a full year.
It’s taken us 20 years to add something else to your relationship with this band."
It’s been long enough that it’s time for an update.
I remember you talking aboutSnowed Inbeing one of your favorites, partly because the recording process was really fast.
Was it the same feeling with this one?
Because remember, we recorded our last album [Anthem] in 2012.
In this case, it’s our seventh, eighth, ninth, depending on how you count it.
And it was a fast album we made the record in basically six weeks.
Does that include writing the new songs?
In all fairness, “Finally It’s Christmas” was written and has been around for a while.
But it was the only song that was already written.
It was percolating as the title track for a while because of the nature of its title.
The slow drumroll:Finally,it’s Christmas.
You’d dropped an Easter egg that I hadn’t picked up.
Well,finally,it’s a Christmas album.
When you’re sitting down to write a Christmas song, how is that process different from normal songwriting?
Our education as songwriters over the years has played to our benefit with that.
But you learn to be disciplined, and then it’s really just the same.
I mean, Christmas music has its roots as a religious holiday, of course.
But for most people, it’s an extremely nostalgic time period.
It’s a time capsule.
So there’s definitely a vintage feeling that comes into play.
You have a box that you kind of have to function within.
How did you develop this record’s sound and choose the songs you wanted to cover?
You’ll have a rock band do a record and it sounds like a crooner record.
They’re trying to be a Christmas act.
And in our case, it was like, “No, it’s Hanson’s Christmas.”
Everybody knows that our origins are soul music and early rock and roll that’san important element.
That one definitely feels like an outlier in this list.
It is, but it’s a modern classic.
It’s become a song that you hear everywhere in ice skating rinks across the world!
Are those your kids?
That’s our kids!
We got all of our kids in a room, and it was kind of crazy.
We didn’t really want to do “Jingle Bells” and those other songs as actual songs.
That was really fun.
It was one of those elements that was kind of an experiment.
We said, “Well, let’s try it.
And if we end up with something good, we’ll use it.”
It was very low-pressure.
It feels connected to the “I Was Born” video too, which also featured your kids.
It is, yeah.
That’s our world now: Everyone’s got kids.
You just shot the video for “Finally It’s Christmas.”
When is that coming out, and what can you tell us about it?
Probably in the first couple weeks of November.
It’s like time travel.
We had a lot of fun.
It’s lighthearted, but I think it’s also going to be pretty beautiful.
