A wintry afternoon with Mary Fahl in Concord
Most musicians find their way to making a Christmas album, but for singer Mary Fahl, holiday tunes triggered thoughts of shopping mall sound systems assaulting her senses. When Fahl finally released Winter Songs and Carols in 2019, it was because she’d found a collection of songs that suited her idea of the season.
The are nods to tradition like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “What Child is This,” along with the haunting medley of “O Holy Night/Silent Night.” The rest of the record is best listened to while sipping cocoa and staring pensively out the window at a snowy horizon.
As an interpreter, Fahl is in a class by herself, breathing new meaning into Joni Mitchell’s “Urge For Going.” She reshapes Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time is Here” into an evocative blend of hope and wistfulness, commands the operatic “Ave Maria,” as she does songs from Sandy Denny, Leonard Cohen, and the 19th-century chestnut “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
Fahl explained by phone the day after Thanksgiving that the album came about for selfish reasons. Recently reading Rick Rubin’s book On Creativity validated her decision, she added. “He said, you have to do things for yourself, not anybody else, just you. That’s why I made that Christmas record … and it ended up being my favorite that I’ve ever done.”
In the spirit of the season, a Dec. 15 show at Concord’s BNH Stage will feature the disc while also drawing from a catalog reaching back to her days with October Project. The early ’90s band hit with songs like “Bury My Lovely” and “Return to Me,” but when their label dropped them in 1996, she left.
“I knew I had another destiny,” she said. “I had to make my own mistakes and grow … try different things. They went their way, and did what they wanted. It all worked out in the end.” Fahl then spent the rest of the decade developing her skills as a songwriter — new and unfamiliar territory for the singer.
“It was terrifying … and I was determined,” she said. “You have to have the courage to be bad at something, and my first few songs weren’t good. But it’s a muscle, and you learn to use it. I got some great tips. I started writing with other very good writers, like Ramsey McLean, who wrote all the lyrics for the early Harry Connick records.”
McLean told Fahl to keep notebooks, because any scrap of thought might be a building block. “He also taught me that even if a song is bad, save it, keep it, because you can harvest it for parts later.” She began weekly writing sessions with another songwriter, Bob Riley. In five years, she produced a long list of songs.
In 2001 she was signed by Sony Records to make her first solo album, The Other Side of Time. Her audition happened a few days after 9/11 in midtown New York City. It was a magical experience that included an impromptu performance of an aria, a request by one of the suits sitting in the boardroom.
She’d learned it years earlier, while trying to not think about her poverty and a brutally hot city summer. “I was just out of college, teaching myself some Pavarotti,” she said. “There was no air conditioner, and it’s sad, I had two broken television sets, one with sound and one with a picture. If you turned them on at the same time, you could watch.”
The youngest in a family of music-loving siblings, Fahl taught herself to sing, inspired by her sister’s Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark records, one brother’s Bob Dylan and another’s prog rock — the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd. She’d later record her own version of the classic album Dark Side of the Moon.
The lack of formal training did not keep Fahl from finding her place as a singular vocalist who puts a unique stamp on everything she performs, even classics like “Both Sides Now” that have been done to death. “Especially with Joni, you’d better make it your own, you’d better find a way in,” Fahl said. “If I can’t, then I don’t do the song.”
Mary Fahl
When: Sunday, Dec. 15, 3 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $43.74 and up at ccanh.com
