ILDE & JIM COOK FOR COOKHOUSE MEDIA
Think of the Pistol Annies—Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley’s country supergroup—and the word “festive” might not come to mind.
As a band, the three powerhouse singer/songwriters have sauntered and snarled their way through swaggering songs like “Hell on Heels,” “Hush Hush,” and “Got My Name Changed Back.” But while they rarely shy away from the topic of heartache, sentimental lyrics aren’t typically their bag. That’s the genius of Hell of a Holiday, Pistol Annie’s new Christmas record. Comprising 12 tracks, it’s filled with all the same grit and sass fans have come to love from the Annies—but this time it’s wrapped up in a red and green bow.
For a group known for penning songs about divorce, revenge, and the occasional manslaughter, writing merry music wasn’t always easy. It took a little convincing and a lot of Annies inspiration. Lambert—who says she’s typically not a fan of Christmas music—took the longest to come around: until December of 2020 when the women reconvened for a writing session at her farm.
“That’s when I really got into it,” she says. “We had already put the tree up and I was like, ‘Girls, we have to write for Christmas because it’s Christmas time now!’”
In fact, it was Lambert who inspired the album’s title track. “Miranda was the one who said Hell of a Holiday, and once she said that all of us were just like, ‘It’s on. We’re going to start writing for it. We’re going to make it happen,’” says Monroe. That title was the starting point for the entire record and allowed the group to create their own signature take on traditional Christmas music.
“We wanted to get every angle: the loving side, the Jesus side, the funny side, the mad-at-your- husband side, the tender side,” Monroe says. “We wanted it to feel real and [capture] the emotions that people feel at Christmas time.”
“This is actually one of the prettiest and sweetest records we’ve made—we didn’t kill anyone or any of that stuff,” Lambert says. “I think that getting to have the fun stuff in this record makes it not so Christmas to where it’s different [for the group], but then we have some classics that we threw in to balance it out.”
Those classics include a reinterpretation of “Sleigh Ride” that mixes country stylings with a decidedly 1960s-esque Ronettes vibe perfectly suited for Monroe’s lead vocals. A cover of “If We Make It Through December” sees Lambert stepping into the shoes of Merle Haggard as she pours her own soul into the Hag’s heartbreaking lyrics. The trio puts a high lonesome spin on “Auld Lang Syne,” which proved to be more difficult than its graceful vocals would suggest.
“It was the last thing we did on the record and we worried and worried about it. We listened to a thousand versions of it,” says Presley, whose voice is most prominent throughout the track. “We got to the studio, and I started singing it and they just chimed in. It turned out to be the most effortless thing that we did on the whole record. In fact, it was so effortless that we started bawling when we sang it.”
“The covers that we put on the album are true to who we are, and we put our own spin on them,” she says. “But we [typically] don’t cut outside songs. We never have. So that was really foreign to us.” Original tracks like the love song “The Only Thing I Wanted;” the hopeful ode to Santa, “Believing;” and the heartbreaking “Harlan County Coal” evoke that emotion on every listen. And “Make You Blue,” a pep talk to those suffering from seasonal depression set to a Motown-inspired backbeat, is sure to be a favorite, with its inspirational chorus “cheer up baby / I’ve got you / don’t let all this red and green make you blue.”
“It’s Annies, so there’s always going to be a little bit of sadness, a little bit of humor, a little bit of sarcasm,” says Lambert. “We put a little more emphasis on the softer sides of us [with this album]. Having the kids in our lives that we do now made it easier to understand what this Christmas record was going to be, but keep our Annies spice because that’s what we are. I think we walked the line really well.”
And true to the Annies canon, the album has some epic barnburners. Up-tempo tracks like “Snow Globe” and “Hell of a Holiday” will have listeners dancing around the tree at home and audiences on their feet should the group ever perform them live. It’s an idea that makes Lambert, Monroe, and Presley light up.
“We don’t get to play together that much, so this could actually give us something yearly to look forward to do together,” says Lambert. “That’s something we never experienced with our other records—[they each] live in their time and people listen to them, but they don’t have a resurgence every year at a certain time. We were trying to make a record that would feel like that.”
As for making a Christmas album that stands the test of time, the Annies took that pressure in stride. “We tried [to make] something that we would want to listen to every year,” says Monroe. “But there is a great hope of, like, hopefully these songs will hit a nerve in people’s hearts, and they’ll want to go back to them every Christmas.”
“We use our lives and our stories,” Lambert says. “We don’t make records but every three or four years because it takes that long to gather more information. So, we go live our lives and we get back together, and we write about it. On this record we really wrote from your household. We’re writing stories that everybody’s living from October to January 1st, and we hope we covered it for anybody that wants to hear it because we ran through the gamut of all the emotions of the holiday.”
As an added gift, the Annies tease that there may be more new music on the horizon. “I’m not letting the cat out of the bag because we are always writing songs, but we didn’t just write Christmas songs when we got together [for this record],” says Presley. “We can’t keep them in.” “We all love playing music together,” Monroe says, “and it doesn’t get to happen that much.”
Chalk it up to husbands and kids, Lambert says. Still, she sees Hell of a Holiday as an excuse for the Annies to get together each year and hopefully spawn a modern-day chestnut. “Having this staple every year gets me excited about what we can do—and not just about the Christmas record. If it became a tradition that we got to do a show around the holidays, then we could do some of our stuff that we never get to sing together,” Lambert says. “I’m so glad we have this because I feel like this record will keep that going year after year.” “We just want to be Mariah,” she laughs. “That’s what we all want.”
Christmas with the Annies
We asked each member of Pistol Annies to share some beloved holiday traditions. And while there were many (Sausage balls! Claymation Christmas movies! Buckeyes!) here are a just a few of their yuletide favorites.
