Heart & friends – Home for the holidays

In December last yaear, Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson performed a concert singing a mix of holiday classics, their own hits and personal favourites written by Joni Mitchell, Harry Nilsson, Bob Dylan and Sammy Hagar.  They were joined by special guests Shawn Colvin, Sammy Hagar, Richard Marx and Pat Monahan from Train.
The concert took place at Benaroya Symphony Concert Hall in Seattle on December 12th 2013.

This certainly isnt a typical release from Heart.  Unlike their normal live releases, it’s not predominantly Heart songs, so really for a proper comparison, you should look at Christmas albums rather than Heart albums.  That’s a better comparison as any album featuring lots of seasonal songs is unlikely to be listened to as much at other times of the year.  As Christmas albums go, this is a very good one – generally I avoid Christmas albums like the plague as they’re inevitably either full of the same few good songs or are full of second rate, cheesy mediocre songs.  This one is different though – for a start there are a couple of real classics in the shape of Heart’s “Barracuda”, and an excellent Led Zeppelin cover, “Stairway to heaven”.  Then you have songs such as “Santa’s Going South”, which while it is a Christmas song, it a Sammy Hagar song, so isn’t your typical Christmas song.

For me the highlight is the superb “Stairway to heaven” cover, and if you’re a Heart fan and don’t already have this song on another release (they’ve previously released a live version of the song as a bonus track on the “Little Queen” expanded edition) then the album is worth buying for this song alone.  This song and the other non-Christmas songs mean you could easily listen to the album all year round, but you’ll probably find yourself skipping the Christmas ones unless you’re listening to the album in December.

The album comes with a second disc – a DVD of the concert which contains the same songs as the CD with one exception – “Even it up” is not included, presumably due to space limitations.

It’s a great release for Heart fans – you’ll get the most out of it at Christmas time, but there’s plenty here that you can enjoy all year round.

Track listing:
CD :

1. The River
2. Seasons
3. Rocking (feat. Shawn Colvin)
4. Love Come Down at Christmas;
5. POEM;
6. All through the Night (feat. Richard Marx)
7. All we need is an Island (feat. Sammy Hagar)
8. Santa’s Going South (feat. Sammy Hagar)
9. Please Come Home for Christmas (feat. Pat Monahan)
10. Remember Christmas
11. Barracuda
12. Even it Up
13. Stairway to Heaven
14. Ring Them Bells.

DVD:

1. The River
2. Seasons
3. Rocking (feat. Shawn Colvin)
4. Love Come Down at Christmas;
5. POEM;
6. All through the Night (feat. Richard Marx)
7. All we need is an Island (feat. Sammy Hagar)
8. Santa’s Going South (feat. Sammy Hagar)
9. Please Come Home for Christmas (feat. Pat Monahan)
10. Remember Christmas
11. Barracuda
12. Stairway to Heaven
13. Ring Them Bells.