Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom announce holiday album, share cover of Willie Nelson/Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Paper”

Dean Wareham, his partner Britta Phillips, and frequent collaborator Sonic Boom have teamed up to make a holiday album. It’s titled A Peace of Us and will be out November 22 via Carpark. They made the album at Sonic Boom’s studio in Portugal: all three sang, Dean played guitar, Britta played bass and keyboards, and Sonic provided the psychedelic effects and mixed the album. Britta says it’s “like Bing Crosby…on acid,” which means a little more when you’re talking about something involving Sonic Boom.

The album included covers of holiday standards and forgotten favorites, original song “Silver Snowflakes,” and it opens with their take on David Berman’s Purple Mountains highlight “Snow is Falling in Manhattan.” The track they’ve shared is a cover of “Pretty Paper” which was written by Willie Nelson and was a hit for Roy Orbison in 1963. “It’s a pretty song,” says Dean, “but the lyrics, about a man who sits alone on the sidewalk outside a department store selling ribbons and paper, are sad and in the midst of the laughter, he cries. Britta arranged this in the style of our synth-heavy score for the Noah Baumbach / Greta Gerwig film Mistress America.”

Watch the video, and check out the A Peace of Us artwork and tracklist, below.

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A Peace of Us
1 Snow Is Falling in Manhattan
2 Pretty Paper
3 Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?
4 Old Toy Trains
5 Snow
6 Silver Snowflakes
7 Stille Nacht
8 You’re All I Want For Christmas
9 Christmas Can’t Be Far Away
10 He’s Coming Home
11 Little Altar Boy
12 If we make it through December
13 Peace On Earth / Little Drummer Boy
14 Happy Xmas (War is Over)