It has been ten years since the release of “The Season Of My Heart”. Every winter since then I have continued to write new Christmas and Seasonal material. Last spring I sent demos of a couple of the tunes to my good friend, producer Stephen Mougin who suggested they might sound nice with a jazz treatment. The concept was new to me as most of my songwriting to that point had been pretty much acoustic bluegrass & gospel oriented.  Stephen assembled a jazz trio featuring Todd Parks on Bass, Chris Brown on drums, Pat Bergeson on guitar and recorded “Christmas Every Day Of The Year” and “Looks Like Snow”. We were amazed with the way they turned out.  That is when the idea of a jazz Christmas album came to light. Stephen went ahead selected songs from my catalog we would record, some of which would need to be re-written and/or re-arranged with more of a jazz feel.

Stephen and I got together and wrote “That’s What I Love About Christmas” to complete the collection…..that ended up being the album title cut.

There were four recording sessions in all that took place from March to May of 2013. The making of this album was a joy from the beginning to end. Stephen did a stellar job putting it all together, and assembling the wonderful group of musicians and singers featured on this recording including: Todd Parks, Chris Brown, Pat Bergeson, Joe Davidian, Aaron Till, Sierra Hull, Ron Block, Annie Sellick, Jana Mougin. In addition to producing the album, Stephen also sang lead and play guitar on a couple of the numbers.

The songs on this album are pretty much my recollection of Christmas’ back when I was a young boy.  The ultimate goal was to re- capture the spirit of Christmas and the magic of the winter season.

As you listen to each one of these songs I hope it will make your heart smile!              – Rick Lang