Hey, Merry Christmas, guys. I know it's like the most cliche thing in the universe to comment on how fast time is moving, but I genuinely can't believe that Christmas is just a few short days away.

But I hope I hope the holiday season has been really beautiful and wonderful for you and yours and I truly hope that 2017 is wrapping up beautifully.

I love this time of year, not only for the magic of the holidays, but I just I love the idea of a fresh year of the calendar switching over. I feel like it's a it's a chance to to reimagine our ideals and in what we hope our upcoming days will look like.

So I love this time of year and I hope that 2018 is going to be your your favorite year yet.

But in the spirit of Christmas, I wanted to do an episode about my one and so far only original Christmas song.

It is called Snow and I wrote it as part of my yearbook series of songs and if you're unfamiliar with what yearbook is way back in 2011.

I decided to write record and release three new songs every month for an entire year.

And each of these three song EPs were were titled after the month that they were released and so so for the December EP, it just made a lot of sense to if there was ever a time to try to write a Christmas song that that would be the time.

So I knew that I wanted to jump in and give it give it my all.

But I also knew it would be a major challenge because there are so many incredible Christmas songs already in existence and I didn't want to just add noise to to to those wonderful songs.

I wanted to add something meaningful and as a friend recently pointed out there's there's really there's not that many new Christmas songs being added to like the list of classic Christmas songs and which is kind of crazy.

I'd be curious to hear if you guys consider any any Christmas songs written in the last like 30 or so years if if you consider them like classic Christmas songs because I was unable to really think of any that were written anytime after like a year.

I was trying to figure out the approach when I was writing this song I knew that I didn't want it to just fall into the same themes and ideas as every Christmas song out there but I also didn't want to stray too far away from from the Christmas spirit.

So the first word that came to mind was family and so I immediately knew that that that word was going to be the centerpiece of this song.

Christmas at its very best is all about closeness and warmth and celebration of family but unfortunately I know far too many people to whom Christmas time reminds them of the hardest parts of their lives the parts that have been broken for years and years.

And in those circumstances holidays are really difficult and rather than an outpouring of love and togetherness and kindness it can be a time of feeling more alone and broken than really any other time of the year.

So I decided to write the song from from that place I wanted to write it for those people that that experience loss in this time of year and of course didn't want this to be the world's saddest Christmas song so it was very important to me that this was gentle with that subject and focused primarily on on hope and on love and on the family that we that we get to build because sometimes the family that were born into.

It isn't able for one reason or another to to love us and to to be there for us in the ways that we deserve or hope for and so we do get this incredible opportunity to to build family with people that we meet along the way and so this song is meant to celebrate those people and to to to find hope in in a in a time that that might be really difficult for some.

So you hear that note that that drones in the very beginning of the song? Well that that single drone is the is the very first sound that this song was born out of.

I sat down and was playing around with different sounds in my electric guitar which which has become a more and more rare occasion I I don't play the guitar nearly as much as I used to even though I do still love it and I imagine that down the road I will I will return to it but I was playing around on the guitar and I

ended up looping that single note and and then I just set the guitar down and sat down on the piano and I played a few really simple chords and quickly realized that this song needed to be completely simple and serve the lyrics that was the entire function of every musical note in the song.

So the chords came together really quick and and kind of created this this simple but hopefully earnest foundation for for the words to be written on top of.

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