Jackson tackles the demanding melodies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century carols such as "O Come, All Ye Faithful" and "Silent Night," and he fares better than most. He sounds more at home, however, on numbers that fit under the wide rubric of twentieth-century pop: a dreamy-eyed "Christmas Song," for instance, and a "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" that sounds like Frank Sinatra fronting the Texas Playboys.
Yet it's the one new song that stands out. A Jackson original, the title track proclaims, over gauzy strings and glockenspiel and acoustic picking: Let it be Christmas everywhere ... Let anger and fear and hate disappear/Let there be love. Clearly, it's kind of a sequel to Jackson's "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?" and that smash's unabashed embrace of love as a concrete human solution to concrete human problems. A timely prayer for hope and joy and peace, Alan Jackson's "Let It Be Christmas" might just be the first great Christmas song of the 21st century.
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