Lee Aaron has launched herself into the Christmas music arena, with a palpably positive, highly entertaining new album, loaded with sassy badassery, superlative musicianship, and the stellar, evocative and powerhouse vocals that have made she and her band a household name on the Canadian rock scene for more than 35 years.

A single/video for the song It Doesn’t Often Snow at Christmas was released earlier this month, and it is part of the album, Almost Christmas, which was released in limited physical quantities shortly thereafter to great acclaim and solid sales for a completely indie release.

An idea of doing a Christmas album had been bouncing around the band for several years, but the combination of being grounded from touring, and the world crying out for something positive heading into the holiday season proved to be the impetus Aaron and the band needed to decide to spread their own rockin’ version of tinsel tinged, sleighbell ringing good cheer. And it’s also a legacy piece, not just for this year (seeing as how there’s no way of people getting the album now until after Christmas) but to add to the celebratory atmosphere for Christmases to come, hopefully when family and friends can gather again.

“We’d be sitting around, and someone would say, ‘well maybe we should do a Christmas album one day.’ And then we’d have another glass of wine in the dressing room and forget about it for months or even years. The thing is, we’ve tried to stay positive as a band, because I know that some of our colleagues have been devastated by this pandemic because their sole source of income is live music. Nobody is making money off records anymore. But, luckily, as a band, we all have other revenue streams like building instruments, teaching and other jobs,” she said.

“When September rolled about, the kids were gearing up to go back to school and I think it was about the second week of September when [guitarist] Sean Kelly [also Coney Hatch, Trapper] phoned me and we were talking and he said, ‘man, I feel like we need to do something that would just make us all really happy and a whole bunch of fans really happy.’ So, the motivation behind this album is really a way for us to do something positive, to just elevate our own spirits, elevate the spirits of fans and the public around us. That was really the motivation. It certainly wasn’t to make money or for any other reasons. Because it was so late in the game, we did not have the time, or the inclination really, to try to go land a proper big distributor for Canada. We just did it independently and promoted it ourselves based on the traffic off our website and social media and, surprisingly, it sold incredibly well.”

Once the discussion became more than just idle chit chat, Aaron, husband and drummer John Cody, bassist Dave Reimer and Kelly, who comprise the roster for the band decided what approach they would take to make this Christmas offering different from the hundreds that come out each year from artists of practically every genre and sub-genre

“Honestly, my initial reaction when we first started talking about doing a Christmas album was oh my goodness, does anybody really need to hear Lee Aaron sing O Holy Night? And I love that song, it’s always been one of my favourite Christmas songs. But there’s sort of like a rotation of about 50 standard Christmas songs that everybody does. And because I have always had a bit of a rebel heart, I was like, ‘we can’t just do a Christmas album with what everybody else has done. I’ve got to do something a little more edgy and a little different.’ So, I sat down with my husband John, and I remember it was a Friday and I said, ‘that’s what we’re going to spend the weekend doing.’ John has got this amazing music collection – he is the nerdiest of record nerds. It’s crazy the amount of stuff he has in his library. And we just started going through stuff. The good news is, he’s got these two massive hard drives where he has been cataloguing things for years, digitally. We were able to just go through it alphabetically and just listen to this or that,” Aaron said, explaining the process by which they chose which songs to cover for Almost Christmas.

“When we landed on something, I thought was really cool, like the Mark Everett song by The Eels Everything Is Going to Be Cool This Christmas, I thought it was great. I had never heard that one before. Which is how we landed on some of the material. The Pet Shop Boys tune was sort of a quirky favourite of mine. It’s not really a song that many people know about or have heard often. But I knew of that song, and they do a completely 1980s, four-on-the-floor synth-pop deal with that one. I said, ‘I think we can really rock this up and make it our own.’ And I’m so happy with what the band and I did with it in the end. I think it worked great. And then of course in the conversations we had over the next week, we realized that we should be including songs that were a little more familiar, maybe not an overdone standard. And believe it or not, Baby Please Come Home and Run, Run Rudolph haven’t been overdone, so we landed on those as well. Sean called us one day and said his sister really wanted to hear us do Run, Run Rudolph [most famously done by Chuck Berry, and later by Lemmy of Motorhead] And so we said, ‘okay, let’s put that one in our song selection.

“A couple of them were just friend and family suggestions that we included as well. I’ve always loved the Slade tune [Merry Christmas Everybody] but a girlfriend of mine from the U.K., she said ‘you’d better be careful because that one is a British Christmas anthem. You’d better make sure to capture the right spirit in that one.’ So, that one was definitely a fun challenge. But in the end, it worked out great. And another one that’s hardly ever been covered is [Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong’s] Zat You Santa Claus? The only other cover that many people would know is Big Bad Voodoo Daddy did one in 2004. It’s another challenge too because of the swing style of drumming. So much of this was a challenge, but a fun challenge, because we realized that we only had a month or so to record everything get it mixed and mastered and if it wasn’t done by the end of October and sent to the manufacturer, we’re not going to be able to deliver this to anybody for Christmas. But it was a really good learning curve for all of us in terms of recording, because we faced COVID-19 challenges in terms of how we were going to piece the songs together and make them sound like our band. From day one, the modus operandi here was not to make an easy listening record – that’s just not who we are a band. We’re a rock and roll band. And even though there are some pseudo-jazz selections on the album, let’s not forget that some of the deepest roots of rock and roll are blues and jazz. I feel that it is a very well-rounded selection of material on this record that displays who we are.”

Another cool addition to the track listing sees the current incarnation of the Lee Aaron band covering a classic from Aaron’s back catalogue – the powerfully compelling ballad Peace on Earth, which was released originally as the final track on her mega-hit album Some Girls Do in 1991.

“Ironically, when I wrote it, it was not meant to be a Christmas song. I wrote it in 1990 and it was inspired by that horrific incident in Tiananmen Square where the Chinese government literally ran over their own peace protesters with tanks. I was just gutted by that after seeing the coverage on television and I wanted to write a song about it. So, Peace on Earth was the result of that emotion coming out on record,” she explained.

“And over the years, for some reason, it’s been kind of adopted by the media and radio as sort of a Christmas message over the last 20 years or so to kind of become my Christmas song. So, we thought it would be a nice offering to redo it and put it out with the new band.”

Almost Christmas was recorded primarily remotely and at a frenetic pace to ensure the single, It Doesn’t Often Snow at Christmas, originally recorded by the Pet Shop Boys in 1999, would be available for download in late November and that physical copies of the album, manufactured and distributed independently through Aaron’s Big Sister Records, could be sent to early orders before Christmas.

This process only came a few months after the completion of the next full on studio album from Aaron, which comes on the heels of 2018’s Diamond Baby Blues and 2016’s Fire and Gasoline.

“We went into the studio in March, the week COVID-19 really exploded in Canada. When it came on the scene and people were freaking out and buying all the toilet paper and things were changing hourly on the news, we had our sessions booked, so we were doing our bed tracks. As it turned out, the studio shut down just after we completed our bed track sessions. Sean flew home a few days early because the level of alarm internationally was off the charts and being separated was a lot for everybody’s family to handle. So, he said he really needed to be home [in Ontario] with his family. But we managed to get it done, in kind of a piecemeal way. We kept busy recording on our own after doing the bed tracks. All of us decided we were going to upgrade our home studios to Logic systems so we could all be working in the same platform. I did my vocals, and Dave came over and did his background vocals. We did various keyboard parts and overdubbed a bunch of guitars and got our album done and mixed and mastered [by legendary engineer Mike Fraser],” she explained.

“I can’t give you an exact date for the new album, or an album title yet because I literally just got the mastered versions of the songs in my Dropbox a week ago. The next step is trying to figure out how exactly we want to put it out. The last two studio albums and then our live in Germany CD/DVD last year, they have all been on my own label, Big Sister Records with an international distributor. And the reason we have done that is because we don’t need anybody to tell us how to make records anymore. I don’t really want to give up an inch of creative control these days. And that’s why we have done it through our own boutique label. So, for this new record, we will be sorting out over the next month or so how we want it to be released. I would say that it would be safe to say that this album will be hitting the streets before summer 2021.

“It’s definitely a continuation in the vein of the last two records. And unlike Diamond Baby Blues, it’s 100 per cent original. We wrote all the songs. When we got together to write this new album, we did it through a different process that we have done in the past. Because we are a bicoastal band with Sean Kelly living in Toronto, we would send ideas and files and voice memos back and forth and wrote the songs that way. For this record, we realized that there is something very magical that happens when just the four of us get together on a stage or in a room to jam. I have expressed this on multiple occasions to the guys in the band that there’s an energy that happens when we’re just doing a sound check and jamming on an idea that gets lost when we’re just sending files back and forth. So, we just had Sean come out here to Vancouver. We told him to bring three or four of his best ideas and we would bring ours, and we would hunker down together for a couple of days like we’re a high school garage band. We had two 14-hour days just piecing together these ideas as a band and jamming and the spirit behind those sessions was, without any filters, without thinking about having to write singles, let’s just write an album that we would love playing for our friends. Let’s just write some really cool songs. And so, we basically wrote 12 songs in two days. There’s such an authentic energy to this new album, were I think we’re getting closer and closer to sounding like the genuine pure rock and roll band that we are.”

For more information on the new studio album, on how to order Almost Christmas and download the holiday single It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas, visit https://www.leeaaron.com, or https://www.facebook.com/LeeAaronMusic.

• Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for nearly 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.