Christmas w/Heather Rankin

Heather Rankin follows her 2016 Juno Award Nominated solo album, A Fine Line, with a Christmas album, Imagine. Her angelic voice wraps her listeners in coziness and nostalgia in this ten-song collection, which includes both original songs, cowritten by Rankin, and traditional songs she grew up singing at Christmas. The evocative imagery in Rankin’s contemplative lyrics inhabit the same deeply personal world Rankin created in A Fine Line, while songs like “Wrap it Up” harken back with frivolity to the music she created with her siblings as The Rankin Family. 

Imagine begins in contemplation of Christmas Past with Rankin’s soaring rendition of “Once in Royal David’s City,” a song that conjures memories for her of the traditional carols that were sung during the Midnight Masses of her childhood. She also lends her ethereal voice to a definitive rendition of “Silent Night,” a song she remembers being sung with verses in six different languages at St. Mary’s Parish in Mabou, Nova Scotia. The orchestrations of these two carols by Imagine’s producer, Steven MacKinnon, as well as the addition of the St. Michael’s Choir School, root them gorgeously in the divine origins of the season. “Olde-Fashioned Christmas,” written by Rankin, MacKinnon and David Tyson, weaves the magic of Christmas into the “humble abode at the end of the road” Rankin and Tyson so beautifully conjured in A Fine Line’s “We Walk As One.” It is simultaneously a poignant snapshot of the warmth and innocence of childhood Christmas, and an exploration of how rapidly technology has dramatically changed the way we connect with one another. Yet, ultimately, our desire to gather for a Christmas meal and raise our voices together in song have remained unchanged over centuries. Along the same theme is “Picture Perfect,” written by Rankin and Jamie Robinson, a song reflecting on how our memories are so often tied to the houses and the haunts where we played as children.