What do You Hear in These Sounds

Having released no less than six charting Christmas albums during his career including one of the Top Ten selling Christmas albums of all time (1958 s Merry Christmas, which hit the Christmas charts 16 times!), Johnny Mathis has probably sold more Christmas records than any other artist in pop music history. And, with a half dozen releases to date on our Real Gone Music label, he is also by far our biggest selling pop vocalist. Add to that the fact that Christmas music is such a big part of what we do here at Real Gone and you can see why the chance to do a truly comprehensive collection of his Christmas music has been a glimmer in our eye ever since we started the label back in 2011. Now, after years of preparation, we are finally ready to release such a collection…and it s turned out even better than we d hoped!

This is the final chapter of a trilogy of albums in which I explored and arranged popular songs. The entire project was made in collaboration with vocalists Theo Bleckmann and Kate McGarry, pianist Gary Versace, and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band. For the first recording, Songs I Like A Lot, I selected the majority of the songs for the album. Many of the songs I chose were from my childhood, and as I started to really listen to them again, I was surprised by how well I actually knew them. The second recording, Songs We Like A Lot, is composed primarily of songs that Theo and Kate liked and chose for me to arrange. Uri Caine held down the piano chair on this recording. And for this third and final recording, Songs You Like A Lot, we asked listeners to nominate their favorite songs for me to arrange. We then had an internet-wide vote on a list of nominated songs, and I chose (with the help of Kate, Theo and Gary) from the top 20 most popular songs.