ARTISTS CONTACT PRESS RELEASE CHRISTMAS ARRIVES EARLY THIS YEAR WITH THE BRAND-NEW HOLIDAY ALBUM FROM BRETT ELDREDGE, MR. CHRISTMAS AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE TODAY Critically Acclaimed Glow LIVE Christmas Tour Returns This November For some artists, a holiday album is little more than an afterthought. But not Platinum-selling recording artist Brett Eldredge, who released the brand-new album Mr. Christmas today (LISTEN HERE). Eldredge believes that Christmas songs capture the light in all of us, letting it shine for a few months each winter, and with Mr. Christmas he embraces a calling to help bring that light out like never before. “I really think some of the last of the magic left in this world is in Christmas music,” Eldredge says. “There’s a lot of joy in this record – even more than the first in some ways – and I wanted to tip a hat to where I started … but also take it to the soulful side of my music. The world is the world, and life comes at you like it does, but I hope you find some joy in this music. I hope it softens life a little bit and puts a smile on someone’s face when they need it. If it does, I’ve done my job.” With four acclaimed studio albums, six number one singles and awards from the Country Music Association, ASCAP, BMI and more, the Illinois native may not seem like the type to feel pulled in by a Christmastime calling – but it fits like a perfectly tailored tux. Mr. Christmas features 11 warm, inviting tunes steeped in the magic Eldredge has long admired. Mixing well-known holiday classics with eclectic, lesser-appreciated tunes and two custom-made Christmas creations, Mr. Christmas is the embodiment of Eldredge’s holiday wonder. Co-written during the pandemic with Ross Copperman, the title track “Mr. Christmas” may as well be the manifesto for Eldredge’s Christmas calling. With its effortless charm and a sound as comfortable as a crackling fire, it reveals the purpose behind the project, and stands shoulder to shoulder with the classics. “Feels Like Christmas” is another soulful new original also written by Eldredge. Full of hope and the comforting traditions he loves so much, it both embodies the excitement Eldredge truly feels when Christmas comes around and celebrates the source of joy we all need these days. The team also coaxed fresh energy and booming vocal glee from beloved tunes like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” They took a swinging run through “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” and added blasting horns, commanding presence and some sly self-assurance to “Cool Yule” – previously covered by everyone from Louis Armstrong to the Brian Setzer Orchestra. “Merry Christmas Baby” revels in early-rock exhilaration, and still others like “O Come All Ye Faithful” tribute the reason for the season. Far from a sleepy soundtrack, the album is defined by a bright and brassy sound paired with his signature soulful vocal that ranges from strutting confidence to quiet reverence – all with class and creative whimsy. Eldredge reenlisted producers Rob Mounsey and Jay Newland, who worked with him on his celebrated 2016 Christmas album, Glow, and in the Spring of 2021 returned to a massive New York City studio normally used for orchestral scores, “rocking a different tux each day, like full on,” he says with a laugh. It all adds up to a reminder that magic does exist – if only for a short time each year – and the release of Mr. Christmas welcomes that time once again. To celebrate its return, Eldredge is also bringing back his beloved Glow LIVE holiday tour beginning this November. A feel-good annual tradition for many, the tour will stop in major cities across the country, including back-to-back nights in Nashville, Boston, Chicago and New York City (for a full list of dates, visit bretteldredge.com). Download Hi Res Here | Credit: Andrew Eccles MR. CHRISTMAS TRACK LISTING 1. “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” 2. “Mr. Christmas” 3. “Merry Christmas Baby” 4. “Jingle Bells” 5. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” 6. “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day” 7. “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” 8. “Cool Yule” 9. “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” 10. “Feels Like Christmas” 11. “O Come All Ye Faithful” GLOW LIVE 2021 TOUR DATES: Nov. 13 – Las Vegas, NV – Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas Nov. 26 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium Nov. 27 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium Dec. 03 – Boston, MA – Boch Center Wang Theatre Dec. 04 – Boston, MA – Boch Center Wang Theatre Dec. 10 – New York, NY – Beacon Theatre Dec. 11 – New York, NY – Beacon Theatre Dec. 17 – Chicago, IL – The Chicago Theatre Dec. 18 – Chicago, IL – The Chicago Theatre Press Contacts: Mary Catherine Rebrovick | Wes Vause Warner Music Nashville MaryCatherine@wmg.com | Wes.Vause@wmg.com ARTIST BIO On his fifth album, Brett Eldredge proves you can go home again. For Sunday Drive, the artist — who has lived in Nashville for the past 14 years and recorded all of his four albums there — decided he needed to make a change. As “Love Someone,” the third single from his self-titled fourth album, was climbing the charts in June 2018, he realized that he couldn’t face rushing back into a studio to record an album every year. He’d followed that course since his breakout debut, Bring You Back, in 2013, generating seven No. 1 singles and gold and platinum albums. But over the years, the rigorous recording schedules, the constant touring, and his ubiquitous online presence took their toll. He began to feel something was missing, something he had not so much lost as mislaid. And all the success in the world couldn’t fill the emptiness he was feeling. “I don’t know if I ever had a sense of what was causing me to feel something was missing at first,” says Eldredge from his home in Nashville. “It’s so easy to get trapped in your own island when you’re on the road; where it’s just a different city every night and there’s no familiar place. I got the point where I was just doing something in repetition, and it was all really good, but I felt I wasn’t giving enough of myself. It takes a lot of self-awareness to finally realize if I do have a lot more in me, then I’ve got to step up and step off the edge.” In 2015 he told a reporter, “I want to do this forever. I want to have a box set someday. I can’t stop. The day I stop being inspired to write songs, I’ll go sit on the beach until I become inspired again.” Which is exactly how he began this album in February 2019. He rented a house on a remote beach on the rugged California coast during the stormiest month in decades, staying there all alone, and he began to look inward. Eldredge took an inventory of his life, excavating the things that scared him, and he began to make some necessary changes. Superficial ones at first, like trading in his iPhone for a flip phone and using only an old-school Polaroid camera to document things that piqued his interest, but crucially distancing himself from everything — especially the seductive lure of Nashville. “Nashville is like a tribe, it’s like a culture,” he says. “As different as you try to be, you’re still going to be around a lot of these influences if you live here. So to be able to get away from it a little bit and to write what I wanted to was important. “I didn’t even listen to the radio for a year. I didn’t want to know what music somebody else was making. Not that I don’t care; I just needed to know what I needed to say myself and not be influenced by anything others were saying. I knew I had to go deeper. I listened to my heart.” One of the things his heart told him was he needed to take more risks, be open to change and not be afraid to write more honestly about the love that seemed to have eluded him so far. He also decided to work with a new production team. A publisher friend suggested he meet with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian after they finished work on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour –- which ultimately won Album of the Year and Best Country Album at the 2019 Grammys. It was an accident of good timing and maybe even fate. “We started working together before that record hit big,” explains Eldredge. “But I could tell they were capable of making something like that; I could just feel it when I was in the room with them. When I met them I told myself, ‘I need to chase this.’” But it wasn’t so much chasing as allowing something new into his tried and true process. There was something freeing for Eldredge about working with this untraditional team who didn’t follow a formula or a country music template. It went a long way to modify his self-declared perfectionism, as much a culprit for his discontent as what he thought were the expectations of Nashville. The three of them initially crammed themselves into Tashian’s Royal Plum Studio, located in the producer’s garage, to record demos — a far cry from the slick polished studios he was used to. “We were just recording in a garage, and we’re all sitting on top of each other,” laughs Eldredge. “Daniel had a bunch of toy pianos and all these crazy instruments that you might get at a garage sale. He had good gear and great guitars too, but nothing really fancy, and it reminded me that I don’t need the fancy. “What I needed was to let my voice be my voice in the space that they were able to allow me to create in. I’ve always felt I haven’t shown my voice yet — not only vocally but also lyrically. But at Daniel’s nothing got in the way of that. Having the beautiful music, being in the right place at the right time and letting me be the artist that I think I was born to be, writing songs in a way I never had. I realized working with the two of them I had a map of where I wanted to go with this album.” It turned out that map led the Paris, Illinois, native back to his home state to make what he likes to calls a “Midwestern” album, reconnecting with some of the values and people that inspired his earlier songs. Eldredge convinced Fitchuk and Tashian that they should record the actual album in Chicago. “You grow and form your own identity, but a huge part of your DNA is the dirt that you’re born on,” says Eldredge. “I grew up three hours south of Chicago, that’s the big city in Illinois, the one that you dream about. My family would gather around the TV to watch Cubs games, and I would dream about the magic things that happen there. It’s always been a place of wonder for me. When I realized that I wanted to get that Midwest flair in my music, I knew going home, was the right thing to do, instead of making records the same way I’ve always done it, in my comfort zone. I was going for something a little deeper, more reflective and personal. “Every morning I’d write ‘be bold’ on the fog of the shower window, and I’d stamp my handprint to remind myself to stop being such a perfectionist and just let things happen,” confides Eldredge. And they did. For two weeks at Shirk Studios, a small, unpretentious room right on the edge of Wicker Park in Chicago, the three of them worked at a reasonable pace, never rushing the process, or recording more than one song a day. “It was easy with Ian and Daniel,” says Eldredge. “They were so open to making the album what I wanted it to be. I would say to them, ‘Help me make this cooler and better.’ And they did. The two of them are so musically inclined — I play instruments but not to the level they do. They took this record to so many different places — going to different chords than I was used to. Sometimes I would just have to leave the room and say to myself, ‘I don’t know what we just did, but I’m glad we did it.’ “I listened to some of the recordings we did in just one pass, one vocal, everybody in the room playing with some bleed from the drums in the main vocal mic. But it was raw and real. I’d never heard myself like this. This was the unbaring of my soul in music, and I realized that I wanted this kind of imperfection. All my favorite records have parts that somebody screws up a little bit or it doesn’t hit the note exactly right, so why should mine be perfect? That realization led to me loosening up the grip on that I had on my life and my music; that moment began to give me a little more freedom of just being me. Working with them walked me into a unique place that is vastly different from my other records. There’re still parts that sound like me. It’s just a grown-up version of me. It’s like I’m finally here.” You can see that growth across the 12 songs on the album, five of which he co-wrote with Fitchuck and Tashian, as well as a who’s-who of songwriters including Scooter Carusoe, Jessie Jo Dillon, Matt Rogers, Tyler Johnson, and Ross Copperman, the last of whom he’d already had five No. 1 hits with. But the album’s title track was in a category by itself. In what was an act of pure serendipity, Eldredge found the tune — written by Barry Dean, Don Mesall and Steve Robson 11 years earlier — in a slush pile when he was working as an intern at Universal Publishing before he had a publishing deal. “I was going through music and transferring CDs to mp3s and listening to songs and lyrics and getting lyrics typed out. One day I heard this one song that never left me. It reminded me so much of the innocence of growing up and the fragility of life, but I also realized that I wasn’t there in my life yet. I was only in the first half of the song.” Eldredge held on to it, keeping it with him through various moves, waiting for the right moment, always a little afraid that someone else would beat him to it. “I don’t usually believe in this sort of thing, but I felt it was written for me.” The only song on the album he didn’t write on the album, “Sunday Drive” might be the place where he reveals his true soul and emotional depth. The slow resolve of this beautiful piano ballad is haunting in its simplicity, and Eldredge’s wounded voice takes the listener on a generational journey through passing time, place, and back to where everything begins — at home. The album is constructed as an epic quest, beginning with leadoff track “Where The Heart Is” and ending with “Paris, Illinois.” The first song sets up a hero’s journey, and each subsequent song supplies another clue to the whereabouts of the heart that has eluded Eldredge, traversing similar territory to Neil Young’s search for a “Heart of Gold” on his 1972 album Harvest. “I know people call me the love-song guy, and it’s accurate — I am a guy who sings love songs,” says Eldredge. “The difference between the love songs I have on this record is that they portray even more realistically what my life is. I’ve always been good at telling stories about love, but to be honest, I’ve never been deeply in love. I’ve had glimpses of something really special, and this album is more about the glimpses and the misses, and the awareness of letting life be what it is and not beating yourself up when love don’t work out all the time.” The other risk Eldredge took was returning to the songwriting and storytelling roots of country music. “I tried not to go in there and make an album thinking it’s going to be straight country and I’m going to make sure we get steel guitars on it,” says Eldredge. “I can’t do that, that’s not me. For me, country music has always had classic stories. This album is a storytelling album. I’m writing from my heart and telling these stories. Does it sound like what you think of when you hear country? Maybe not, but I just want it to be great music and leave it like that.” With his soulful voice, pop sensibility, and his love of Frank Sinatra, he has accessed a back door into these songs, creating a mood in which listeners feel they are experiencing the same things he is: the raw vulnerability of “The One You Need,” the summertime nostalgia and heartland rock swing of “Magnolia,” the slow-dance regret and lost connection of “Crowd My Mind,” the autobiographical anthem “Good Day,” the gorgeous guitar come-on of “Would You Fall for Me.” “When I Die” was written after the singer tried to imagine what his last day on earth would be, and the profundity, depth and humor of this epic number is astonishing. “Gabrielle” has more questions than answers, giving a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been, while “Fix a Heart” feels like an old fashioned waltz with tea-stained memories, muted horns, and true confessions of why the singer is still single. “Then You Do,” one of the album’s standouts with its shining poetic imagery, and languid guitar, is the saga of a relationship with a surprise ending, lingering in the memory long after the last graceful note dissolves. “Paris, Illinois” rounds out the album’s quest via a love song to Eldredge’s hometown and to a way of life, and suggests that he’s found something just as important as love: himself. “I never really thought whether I was making a relationship album, but I think it’s a relationship album with myself.” CONTACTS PUBLICITY - USA PUBLICITY - UK PUBLICITY - INTERNATIONAL PHOTOS ALBUM ARTWORK VIDEOS © Q Prime Management 2021. 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