Steven Page Is Making the Christmas Album He Wanted
Steven Page performing at a Christmas lights event in Toronto in 2009.
Steven Page performing at a Christmas lights event in Toronto in 2009.
Steven Page has announced a holiday album for this autumn, more than twenty years after making one he has said he did not want to make.
A December trio tour follows it.
The Christmas Album He Did Not Want
His former band released a holiday record in 2004, and he has since said it was not his idea and not something he wanted to do at the time.
That is an unusually direct thing for a musician to say about their own catalogue, and it is worth taking at face value.
Holiday albums are frequently label-driven, because they sell reliably, cost little to make and can be reissued indefinitely.
An artist who does not want to make one has very little leverage against that arithmetic, which is presumably how it happened.
Why This One Is Different
The new record is his own, made with his own trio, at his own pace, and includes songs he chose rather than songs assigned to him.
The distinction matters for a genre where sincerity is the entire product, since a Christmas album made under duress tends to sound exactly like one.
Audiences are unusually good at detecting insincerity in this material, probably because they have heard so much of it.
Songs Written for a Band That Did Not Use Them
The album includes holiday songs he wrote during his years in the band, which is the most interesting item on the tracklist.
Songwriters accumulate material that does not fit the project they were writing for, and holiday songs are especially prone to this, since there is only one window a year to use them.
Material written in 2003 or 2004 and recorded in 2026 arrives with a specific quality, since it was written by a younger person for a different band.
New Originals in a Fixed Canon
The record also carries new original songs, which is the hardest thing to do in holiday music.
The Christmas repertoire effectively closed decades ago, and almost nothing written since has entered general circulation.
Writers keep trying because the reward for succeeding is enormous, since a single song that enters the canon generates income every December indefinitely.
Why New Christmas Songs Fail
The failure mode is consistent and worth naming: new holiday songs are usually about Christmas rather than set at it.
The standards that survived are mostly about longing, distance, home and weather, with the season as a setting rather than a subject.
A song that lists festive imagery has nothing underneath it, which is why it disappears by January.
The Traditional Half
The album also includes traditional holiday songs, which is the part every such record needs.
Those songs are what an audience actually shows up for, and a record composed entirely of originals will not be played at anybody’s Christmas.
The usual construction is roughly half familiar material and half new, which lets the originals be heard in company they benefit from.
A Trio Rather Than a Band
The touring configuration is a trio, which suits both the material and the venues.
Three players can cover a great deal of ground if one of them sings, and the format allows arrangements to breathe in a way a full band cannot in a seated theatre.
It is also the configuration in which a strong voice is most exposed, which is a reasonable bet for a singer known primarily for one.
December Dates in Theatres
The run includes Le Poisson Rouge in New York on 10 December and a Syracuse date on 18 December, among others.
The venues are theatres and listening rooms rather than clubs, seating several hundred, which is the standard scale for this kind of touring.
Those rooms programme heavily in December because a holiday show is the most reliable seller a regional theatre has all year.
Nearly Forty Years of Material
The shows combine the seasonal material with songs from a career approaching four decades.
That mix is standard for holiday touring and it is also a practical necessity, since a new Christmas album does not contain enough material anybody knows to fill an evening.
What it produces is an unusual set list, moving between songs written last year and songs an audience has known since the nineties.
Leaving a Successful Band
He left the band he co-founded in 2009, after which both parties continued separately.
Departures of that kind are common and the outcomes are usually asymmetric, with the band retaining the name and the audience and the departing member starting again.
What made this case different is that the voice most associated with the catalogue was the one that left, which complicates the arithmetic for everybody.
A Canadian Career
The band was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, an occasion that brought the original lineup back together.
Canadian music institutions have a stronger role in domestic careers than their equivalents elsewhere, partly because of broadcast content requirements that guarantee airplay.
That structure has produced a generation of acts with durable domestic followings and variable international ones.
Comedy and Songwriting
His former band was widely categorised as comic, which is a description that has consistently undersold the writing.
Funny songs are held to a lower standard by listeners and a higher one by writers, since a joke that does not land ruins a song in a way a weak metaphor does not.
Artists associated with humour frequently spend later careers demonstrating that they were doing something else as well, and a Christmas record is an unexpectedly good vehicle for that.
Revisiting Work You Disowned
Going back to a project you were unhappy with is a specific kind of career decision, and it is rarer than it sounds.
Most musicians simply leave the material behind, because returning to it invites the question of what was wrong the first time.
Doing it deliberately, and saying why, converts an old grievance into the frame for a new record. That is a considerably more interesting pitch than another holiday album, and it is presumably why the announcement was made this way.
It also carries a risk. A record positioned as the corrected version of an earlier one invites direct comparison, and the audience will make it whether or not the artist wants them to.
What a Voice Does in December
Holiday touring makes particular demands on a singer, and they are not the obvious ones.
The material sits high. A great deal of the canon was written for voices with easy top registers, and twelve nights of it in three weeks is harder than a rock set at the same frequency.
The rooms are also dry and heated, the tours run through winter, and every performer on this circuit describes the same thing: the songs are easy and the schedule is not.
What carries it is that the audience is entirely on your side, which is not true of any other kind of touring.
What Is Actually Being Tested
Two things. Whether an artist can make a genuinely personal record in the least personal genre in popular music.
And whether songs written for a band twenty years ago sound like recovered material or like something that was always meant to wait.
One album he did not want, one he did, a trio, and twelve nights in December.
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