With the holidays around the corner, John Legend has decided to release a Christmas album called “A Legendary Christmas.” With his previous albums providing an R&B and soul type of feel, he’s decided to bring his style to some holiday classics.
With “Silver Bells,” normally a slow and mellow song, Legend decides to jazz it up a bit making the song sound almost new. The pace of song, while different, sounds amazing behind the big jazz band. Legend also delivers with energy and his amazing vocals.
“Christmas Time Is Here” also has a vibrant jazz feeling to it, with bass guitar and brass instruments providing the base of this track. Legend plays with the words on this song especially, slowing them down to add a little spice to the lyrics.
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is a good song as well with Legend and Esperanza Spalding providing some good vocals. The acoustic guitar playing in the background meshes really well with the vocals of the two artist.
“What Christmas Means to Me” is a decent track with an awesome feature by Stevie Wonder. Legend doesn’t bring anything new to the song, basically using the original song and tweaking it. The star of this song however, is Stevie Wonder, with his harmonica solo ending the song on a fantastic note.
“The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On an Open Fire)” sounds beautiful with piano and bass adding the needed substance to this song. The trumpet solo towards the end of the song is amazing and flowed well with the other instruments.
“Merry Christmas Baby/Give Me Love” is a good track, with Legend again delivering really good vocals. The only issue with the song is that the “Give Me Love” section is too short. Legend should have given that song more time and cut back on “Merry Christmas Baby.”
This album takes a lot of risk with Legend bringing his style to holiday classics. However, some of his risk on this album end up delivering decent to bad songs.
“Purple Snowflakes” sounds okay, but it doesn’t bring anything new to this album. Legend’s singing on this track does not sound good with the music at all. The high notes the he sings sound out of place and the backup singers do not sound good on this song.
“Waiting for Christmas” and “By Christmas Eve” sound similar and could have been joined together like some other songs on this album.
Another issue is that even though most of the album is good, there could have been more classic holiday songs on this album. Tracks like “Jingle Bells,” “This Christmas,” “Silent Night” and “White Christmas” could have been great additions to an album like this.
Overall, "A Legendary Christmas" is great for the holidays especially for people who like more upbeat Christmas songs. However, if you like the original Christmas songs, this might not be the album for you since Legend does change a lot of the classic Christmas songs. 3.5/5
