Nana Mouskouri - Christmas With Nana Mouskouri

Here we have a Nana Mouskouri album ... finally. I mean this is a sort of big deal. She was always that singer who wore the big black glasses. I had no idea what she sounded like, but it's funny that we all knew who she was. I mentioned in another post I thought that she and Roger Whittaker were two sides of the same coin. I managed to find Roger Whittaker's Christmas album, and recently I was rummaging in the dollar bin for Christmas records and scored a really nice copy of Nana Mouskouri's 1972 album "Christmas With Nana Mouskouri." 

Musically the songs hold up really well. I'm never quite sure what to expect with some of the stuff from the early '70s. The arrangements lean to the traditional, although there are a number of songs where there's a folky flavour. This was before adult contemporary was a thing, but I suppose it was always a thing just not a genre. So many things get shoehorned into a box after the fact, and I'm trying to see where this fits. Which means I'm trying too hard to process what I'm hearing, rather than listening to what I'm hearing for what it is.

Make sense?

The first time through, the album was enjoyable enough, and the songs were good and covered a lot of the expected bases as well as breaking some new ground for me, which I always enjoy. I thought her voice was nice, but aside from being slightly operatic I found her tone a little thin, and her vibrato was a little too warbly for my taste. Why was she so famous? By the second time through my earlier complaints were more or less erased and the charm of her delivery started to come through and there was something in her singing that was warm and engaging. Maybe I'm just overly fickle, or perhaps too quick to judge.

The album opens with the first of two interpretations of "Ave Maria" with the first one covering the Charles Gounod version, and the album closes with the more well known Schubert arrangement. Both are really good. When the Athenians kicked off "Go Tell It On The Mountain" I wasn't sure where it was going, but then it settled down. I don't tend to lean into the Spirituals, but this was pretty good. I really liked the French language songs, "Petit Papa Noel" and "Minuit Chretiens" but it was her version of Roger Miller's "Old Toy Trains" with the double bass and acoustic guitar that was my favourite song here.

You can't tell because of how time works with writing versus the time I've been sitting here listening to the record, but I've been poking away at the alphabet for a bit in between doing other stuff. The album has been flipped over a few times now and each time it plays through something else stands out. Which makes it sort of tempting to just start again and give a blow by blow as the songs play through, but dagnabbit I'm invested in this now so I'm just going to push through. See, this is what separates the real writers from the plebs like me who have more spare time than sense. I have just enough hubris to think this will be worthwhile in the end. If you're still reading, thanks.

As far as Christmas records go, this may not be a classic, but there are more than enough moments here to make this one worthwhile. I'm not sure I'll run out and pick up her Greatest Hits or anything, but I'm pretty glad I got to hear this one and finally put a voice to the glasses.

Cheers.