Norweigan singer Paal Flaata releases his new Christmas record today!

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For Paal Flaata, parts of November and all of December until Christmas Eve are synonymous with being on tour. It has been 17 years since Paal released Christmas Island, but Paal Flaata has actually released a third Christmas records earlier. In 2017, he released "I Wish Every Day Could Be Like Christmas" with Vidar Busk and the deeply missed Stephen Ackles. Here the three friends took turns standing in front of the microphone to sing rock classics made famous by Elvis Presley.

- I am very fond of Christmas songs, and in many ways I think of Christmas music as of country music, in the sense that it is a big genre. That's why it's natural for me to do Elvis songs too. "Christmas Island" is also a more modern record than "I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day". Now I think it was great to make a record that sounds so incredibly old-fashioned, it made sense to do something completely different. As a follow-up album, I'm very happy with this one, there are two different versions. So it's like that if you do gospel and hymns and things about each other, Christmas music contains a lot of all this. There is a period of the year when you buzz with it, it becomes a bit cozy in the middle of winter.

The fact that the new album is strongly influenced by religious Christmas carols has primarily to do with the fact that they are difficult to ignore in the search for the right material. Flaata would like to go for songs with somewhat the same function and form as lullabies, and therefore we can now hear evocative interpretations of the Austrian Christmas carol "Still, Still, Still" and timeless classics such as "Away In A Manger" and "Auld Lang Sight".

They had to include one country classic as well, Willie Nelson's "Pretty Paper."

- It is also a small cornerstone, one of the first I came across that is located in a landscape I know well. We were a little doubtful because it is outside of everything else, but it is cool to have a different color in the middle. It was also a challenge for me to try to sing as high as Roy Orbison, so it was reassuring for me that I didn't have to go any lower.

There is broad agreement among music lovers in Norway that Paal Flaata's "Christmas Island" is one of the few truly flawless Norwegian-produced Christmas records out there. With the new album " I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day", he repeats the success, if not tops it.