Angus releases Christmas EP The Gilly Season
2022 Golden Guitar winner Angus Gill returns with his fifth studio release The Gilly Season, an exciting collection of fresh, original Christmas songs for your playlist. From the wry and witty appeal of Cheapskate Christmas and Mistletoey, to the fun Present Time and Don’t Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle, to the heartfelt ballad First Christmas Without You…Gill perfectly captures the gamut of emotions that accompany The Silly Season. Other rather, The Gilly Season!
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Cheapskate Christmas (Angus Gill/Bill Whyte)
Every year at Christmas, Nan would always turn up to our house with a big old sack overflowing with presents. She’d dole them out to us like a deranged Mrs Claus and watch our faces to see how delightfully disappointed we were! Somehow we thought they’d get better, but we were clearly kidding ourselves! My good friend, Nashville songwriter and comedian, Bill Whyte and I wrote this song about every crappy Christmas present we’ve ever been given.
Don’t Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle [feat. Melinda Schneider] (Angus Gill/Bill DiLuigi/Kirsti Manna)
Tinsel is a sleek combination of witty and silly all rolled into one festive package! It’s actually quite a hard song to sing, due to the tempo and the deliberate tongue twisting nature of the words. I wanted to write a song like this, as I’ve often covered The Auctioneer & I’ve Been Everywhere in my shows. I wrote it as a duet, with my good friends and collaborators Bill DiLuigi and Kirsti Manna. I instantly had Melinda Schneider in mind to sing it with me, as I’ve always admired her as an artist and vocalist. Thankfully, she loved the song and agreed to do it with me.
Mistletoey (Angus Gill/Randy Brooks)
For an idea like this, I thought it was only fitting to collaborate with Randy Brooks, who is best known as the writer of the Christmas smash hit Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I had the title first and thought it was quite an amusing idea to play off the two meanings of being “toey” at Christmas. It was a blast rhyming this with Randy! We managed to namecheck the Christmas song I loathe the most, Deck the Halls and include a scat section where I could release my inner Roger Miller. It’s pure fun!
First Christmas Without You (Angus Gill)
Christmas usually comes with a gamut of emotions: joy, happiness, anxiousness, excitement, but there’s also a melancholy side, thinking of the ones who would usually be there with us celebrating, but sadly can’t be. I wrote this in 2020, after losing my dear Grandma. I walked outside on a rainy day and glanced over to Grandma’s garden and thought, “this’ll be our first Christmas without you” and the song basically wrote itself. It’s a song very close to my heart, because it’s 100% true.
Present Time (Angus Gill/Stuie French)
This was the catalyst for this original Christmas EP project, which is something I’ve always wanted to do and something you don’t see done too often. It’s a difficult thing to do, extracting fresh ideas and angles from well trodden topics, such as Christmas, but with these songs, I think we’ve achieved a unique ‘Angus Gill’ take on Christmas. Stuie French and I wrote this song about 7 or 8 years ago. It captures the fun, silliness, bickering and humour that comes with a household of energetic kids waking up on Christmas Day. It features legendary Pixie Jenkins voicing the characters of Mum, Dad and the kids.
Angus Gill – The Gilly Season EP Credits:
Produced by Angus Gill
Engineered & Mixed by Angus Gill @ Hot Plate Studios
Mastered by Jeff McCormack @ The Music Cellar
Musicians:
Glenn Wilson – Drums & Percussion
Jeff McCormack – Bass
Stuie French – Acoustic & Electric Guitars
Jeff Taylor – Piano
Russell Dick – Piano
Michel Rose – Pedal Steel
Paul Hollowell – Hammond B3 Organ
Angus Gill – Acoustic Guitar, Character Voices & Background Vocals
Pixie Jenkins – Character Voices
TC Cassidy – Background Vocals
Templeton Thompson – Background Vocals
