Smith has loved that time of year, professionally speaking, enough to be on his third Christmas release with It’s a Wonderful Christmas . And this one was a particular thrill to make, Smith says, because he was able to record it with a 65-piece orchestra in the famed Abbey Road Studios in London known for birthing famous albums from The Beatles to Radiohead. The orchestra lends a marked change, though Smith hasn’t completely shed his piano-pop core on Wonderful Christmas.
Album track “Christmas Day,” in particular, is stocked with his trademark contemplative hooks and features a radio-ready contribution from American Idol alum and Nashville favorite Mandisa. Smith was impressed enough with her contribution — “She just, in my opinion, knocked it out of the park,” he says — to ask her to come along on his Christmas tour, which starts Thursday and ends in Nashville on Dec. 22 at Brentwood Baptist Church.
Scheduling conflicts prohibited Mandisa’s inclusion, so fellow Idol -er Melinda Doolittle will take that spot (and helm Mandisa’s duet part in “Christmas Day”). Most of the 11-song Wonderful Christmas set uses Smith’s pop sensibility as a skeleton beneath an intricate, lush and (seasonally appropriate) grandiose score.
Smith calls the experience of hearing his melodies fleshed out to that grand scale “one of the most thrilling recording experiences of my life.” (He offers a “hats off” for providing that experience to arranger David Hamilton.) “Gosh, that’s a dream come true for me,” Smith says. “You have the melody in your head and you put it down, you sort of have an idea of what you want the thing to be about. . . . It’s just amazing to be able to hear that sort of sound, which is really very big and epic.