Rolling Stone (Aug. 15th 2012)
Cee Lo and Blake Shelton Both Releasing Christmas Albums
Proving the cliché “great minds think alike,” fellow Voice coaches and good friends Cee Lo Green and Blake Shelton are both releasing Christmas albums this year, the pair told Rolling Stone. While both have been working on their respective alums for a bit, each only found out recently the other was feeling the holiday spirit.
“I just heard last week also that he was doing one,” Shelton told us of Green’s album.
“I didn’t realize Blake was working on a Christmas album as well,” Green added.
Just like on The Voice, some playful competition emerged as they discussed their simultaneous holiday records (release dates TBD). “I’ll tell you this – Santa loves me a hell of a lot more than he loves Cee Lo,” joked Shelton.
“Actually, Cee Lo has a guy on his team that looks a hell of a lot like Santa this year, now that you mention it,” Shelton said. “I may be totally out of place saying all that.”
Green, who worked on his Christmas album with Glee executive music producer Adam Anders, promises his typical flair and panache brought to holiday favorites. “You’ll really enjoy it. It’s definitely a great soulful spin on Christmas classics,” he said.
“I did a version of ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,'” he says. “That says a lot. Just ponder on that.”
It was enough to make Shelton envious. “That’s a great idea, that son of a bitch,” he said. “Damn it.”
All joking aside, given their strong friendship, they have a solution – releasing the albums together. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe we should do a Voice gift pack, deluxe,” said Shelton. “I’d be more the down-home family, he’d be more the making love in front of the fire and the stockings.”
Shelton is definitely going for the family vibe: he wrote a track called “Time for Me to Come Home” with his mom. “[She’s] not somebody who writes songs. She can sing, but she’s not a singer,” he said. “My mother, my family, home – that is Christmas to me.”
Not surprisingly, while Green has a playfulness talking about his Christmas album, Shelton is a bit more earnest. “This is honestly the only Christmas album that I plan on ever making. And I wanted to do one that counted and is timeless and, hopefully, classic,” he says.
He drew inspiration from a fellow country artist with crossover appeal. “Anne Murray’s Christmas album was always one of my favorites. And I wanted to do my album how she did it. It was just a classic-sounding record, and it was a bigger deal than a genre,” he said. “That’s how I wanted to do my album. I open my mouth, I’m talking right now, I’m a hillbilly, I can’t help it. But it doesn’t mean that I have to approach my album that way. It sounds like me singing, but I wanted my Christmas album to not fit in anywhere. I just wanted it to be Christmas.”