New Christmas album helping local families at the holidays
By Kyle Schmidt
Musicians from around the country have come together to create a Christmas album that benefits people right here in St. Joseph.
The 23-track “Mark Murtha’s Christmas Party in Kansas City” is helping nonprofit organizations across Missouri, including AFL-CIO’s Adopt-A-Family program locally.
Murtha, a guitarist and the producer of the album, gathered 40 artists to make it happen.
“I just like to give back to the community, I think it is a great opportunity to do that,” Murtha said. “People love Christmas music and a lot of people look for new Christmas music each year.”
Murtha and his wife Lisa produced the album and built connections over years of meeting and playing with others. The couple resides in Kansas City but the people on the album are all over the country and even one from Spain. Each person involved in the album worked on it at no charge.
“Most of the songs on the album are songs that I loved as a child,” Murtha said. “The Little Drummer Boy, that is my favorite Christmas song ever when I was a kid.”
Drummer for the band Head East and St. Joseph native Eddy Jones appears on four songs.
“Fortunately most of the people you work with and you interact with, over years and years have been in this business,” Jones said. “Most people are good-hearted people.”
Jones said his favorite song to play on was “The 12 Days of Touring.” But he has high praise for the songs he was not involved with as well.
“Some of the arrangements and some of the orchestrations and stuff that he’s done,” Jones said. “After, as a fan of music, just listening, I was pretty blown away.”
Most of the songs on the album are “rocked-out classics” but some have jazz tones as well. Two songs on the album are originals — “Snowflakes” and “Please Please Please Please Please.” “Snowflakes” is a song written from the heart by Murtha thinking about his mom who died when he was 17.
“That song was really neat thinking about her, and Christmas is a time where you think about all the people,” Murtha said. “The people who are with you but the people who aren’t with you anymore.”
Of course, it was not always smooth sledding while working on the project. Murtha said vocals were a challenge to get the best performance and takes. It also wasn’t easy creating original arrangements over Christmas classics.
“I’m a big fan of Vince Guaraldi from “The Charlie Brown Christmas” and his rendition of those songs (“Christmas Time is Here” and “Skating”) are perfect,” Murtha said. “I tried to not do any damage to his beautiful versions of that song and I added guitar and tried to do it tastefully.”
The album can be purchased locally at Fab-U-Less Finds, 1203 N. Sixth St., and also is available to buy from several online sources.
