Gabrielle Lovelace will release The Secret of Christmas on Nov. 20 through Old Bear Records. The five-track EP takes its name from a song Bing Crosby introduced in the 1959 film Say One for Me. It also includes a Nativity song Lovelace’s father helped write and an original about how lonely the holidays can feel.
Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote the title track. For Lovelace, its appeal is the idea that the kindness people associate with Christmas has more lasting value when they practice it year-round. “Snow Globe,” which she wrote with Anthony Hoisington, approaches the season from another direction. A piano prelude leads into a song about feeling alone at a time when togetherness is everywhere you look. On “Presents and Bows,” the bustle of Christmas shopping gives way to a prayer for quiet.
“Holding Her Baby Boy” comes from a Christmas musical. Tim Lovelace wrote it with Sue C. Smith and Lee Black. His daughter said she was drawn to the way the song holds the scale of the virgin birth alongside an intimate scene between Mary and her child.
Gabrielle Lovelace produced the EP with Chris and Anthony Hoisington of Brothers McClurg, the same team behind her October debut, Poetry in Emotion. She is set to join the brothers in December for their Goin’ Back to Bethlehem tour, with stops in Buffalo and Batavia, New York, and Niagara Falls, Ontario.
Earlier this year, Lovelace gave Rich Mullins’ “Screen Door” a full-band makeover. The Christmas EP gives her another chance to put an older song next to her own writing, this time with piano, understated production and a piece of her family’s songwriting history.