Andrea Corr releases Christmas album

Here are the four songs on YouTube. The highlight for me is "Begin Again", an original song by Andrea Corr laid on top of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" in a polyrythmic form with her song in 3/4 and the underlayed song in 4/4.





 
Andrea setting the tone for a covid Christmas..........no frills, but none the less special.
 
Still listening to these recordings two months after Christmas. There's something so pure about her voice that I don't care if spring is around the corner!

PS. Hi everyone by the way, my name's Fran and I found this forum by chance. I love to see so many Corrs' fans here! :)
 
I missed this post and had no idea she released a Christmas album. Was this physical cd or digital?

I really like Begin Again, could have used that last Christmas. What is that noise suppose to represent at the very end?
 
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I don't think there was any kind of physical CD of this, only downloads. I'm not sure what the noise is supposed to be at the end. It almost sounds a bit like an old 78 record would sound on its runout groove over and over again.
 
I guess I'm old school. I don't subscribe to streaming music. I see the album on iTunes but it's only available on Apple Music which is a streaming service you pay monthly for...in other words you don't own the music. Amazon is the same way (in the US) but I see it on Amazon UK where you can purchase the mp3's although I'm not sure they will allow it for US.

It's crazy she would do this release but make it so hard for people to purchase it without a subscription.
 
Still listening to these recordings two months after Christmas. There's something so pure about her voice that I don't care if spring is around the corner!

PS. Hi everyone by the way, my name's Fran and I found this forum by chance. I love to see so many Corrs' fans here! :)
Welcome Fran. We've had on-and-off discussions about The Corrs since about late 1999.
 
I guess I'm old school. I don't subscribe to streaming music. I see the album on iTunes but it's only available on Apple Music which is a streaming service you pay monthly for...in other words you don't own the music. Amazon is the same way (in the US) but I see it on Amazon UK where you can purchase the mp3's although I'm not sure they will allow it for US.

It's crazy she would do this release but make it so hard for people to purchase it without a subscription.
I just had a look on iTunes, and see that Andrea's Christmas EP is available for purchase on the Canadian store. Not like that helps you though Rick. :sad: I've just been listening to the tracks on YouTube, but I should probably buy it from iTunes while I still have the chance... I have no idea why Andrea, or her label, would sell the files here, but not in the US. Makes no sense.

Right now, iTunes is the ONLY place left that still sells music downloads in Canada, but who knows how long much longer that will last. Google closed their music store, and converted it to YouTube Music (streaming only). TIDAL used to sell downloads as well as their streaming service, but now it's exclusively streaming. Amazon doesn't sell mp3s here, only their "Music Unlimited" streaming service. Qobuz isn't interested in doing business here, for reasons they've never explained.

Sadly, music download sales have fallen off a cliff, compared to just a few years ago. I too, refuse to pay monthly to rent music, but I can see the day coming where that will be the only way to hear a lot of new music, at least in better quality than what's on YouTube.
 
It's madness how the music industry has evolved over the last couple of decades and reduced the options for customers, making it increasingly difficult to get certain products depending on the country you live in. I am from Spain and it's a nightmare to get some songs that are only released on the US or Japan, to say something, and I imagine it must be the same the other way around based on what I'm reading here. I don't like digital music, but I guess there's not much of a choice... Better than nothing though.

Regarding The Corrs I've been lucky enough to live in a place where they were huge back in the day, so their music is fairly widespread over the main music stores here. Especially from 1997 to 2002-ish they were omnipresent. After that their presence on radio and TV started to slowly fade away, and although 2015's comeback with 'White Light' was rather succesful in terms of exposure to the media, it wasn't even a third of what it used to be back in the 90's. 'Jupiter Calling' was a straightaway fiasco... Anyway, I'm happy that Andrea decided to record some songs after all this time. Her voice has matured in a way I like a lot, it might not be as powerful as it was in the past but I find she's gained a lot of expresiveness and warmth.

It's funny that I stumbled upon this forum to find such a Corrs' community apropos of The Carpenters. It was the other way around for me. I "discovered" The Carpenters through Sharon Corr's music. I've followed both sister's solo careers as well as The Corrs', and Sharon released a record called 'The Same Sun' in 2013. The first single off it was "Take a Minute" and many people claimed it could have easily been something Karen Carpenter could've sung. I was living in England at the time and there was a record store close to my house, so I'd go there to dig for LPs every saturday morning. One of those days I found a copy of The Carpenters 'Gold' vinylfor 2 or 3 pounds and grabbed it. When I put the needle on it I instantly understood why the comparison between Karen and Sharon, and I ended up pretty happy with the purchase.

Well, hope to share experiences here, you seem like a nice group. And thanks for the welcome, Harry! Appreciate it.
 
Always happy to discuss The Corrs. I have a fairly large collection of their physical product as I was quite obsessed in the early 2000s and sought just about every release. I've got more copies of IN BLUE than I know what to do with! And the highlights of being a Corrs fan was seeing and meeting them at NBC in New York in 2000, then travelling to Australia to see full-on concerts by them in Sydney and Melbourne in 2001, and finally meeting Sharon, Jim and Andrea in Boston in 2004.
 
Wow! So you got the chance to meet them in person their heyday Harry, that's quite interesting. Before social media and the internet revolution all these people seemed so unreachable that it felt like a privilege to even say hi to any of them. I had the opportunity to meet Sharon in London, she was recording a radio session at the BBC studios and I happened to be spending my day off wandering about in the city, so it was a happy coincidence. Then I attended a concert of hers in Oxford a few months later and she did a meet & greet when the gig finished. Very nice lady, sometimes you forget that she's a normal person just like any of us.
 
Yep. I "discovered" them on New Years Eve, 1999, when I picked up TALK ON CORNERS in a record store on my way home from work. My brother-in-law recommended them telling me he thought they sounded like Carpenters.

On first listen I was sold, and by mid-January of 2000, just a couple of weeks, I was well on my way to acquiring a bunch of their CDs, singles, VHS tapes, and even Asian Video CDs of their Albert Hall and Lansdowne Road concerts, and UNPLUGGED. Getting past the region coding and format differences was a challenge, but thankfully, Canada got a lot of their stuff, and is the same formats as here in the States.

Rumors of a new album (IN BLUE) surfaced later that year and I was among the first to get a copy over here in the States. In September, they were due to appear in New York on several of the morning shows. One was the TODAY SHOW on a Saturday morning, so without missing any work, my wife and I drove up to New York from Philadelphia, got to THE TODAY SHOW an hour or so early and got a great spot just along-side the outdoor stage. When they came out to rehearse and sound-check, we got to talk to them a little bit. Andrea was surprised to see us wearing some home-made T-shirts with their older logo on it, thinking that the US audience really didn't know about them yet. She wanted to know where we found t-shirts!

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She's pointing to her top as she asked us where we got our shirts.

Later on, after the show, she and Sharon left quickly to go shopping in New York City, and we got some autographs from Caro, Jim and Anto Drennan.

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Marie, my wife, (white shirt), handing pen and CD book to Caroline in the van.

In 2004, the radio station group I worked for managed to get us into both the rehearsal and front row seats at the Boston concert. Caroline was already out having her first child on that tour, so only three Corrs were there.

After the rehearsal, on a VERY HOT day in Boston, we were invited to have some pictures taken.

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My wife Marie, myself, Andrea, Jim, Sharon. The photo actually had a bunch of people to the right side, but I cropped them out!
 
You were very fortunate, Harry, to have attended a concert from the "Borrowed Heaven" tour (and being invited to the rehearsal, and getting to hang out with the band... wow!). That tour - the only time they toured North America - was a total fiasco. Lots of shows were cancelled, leaving many disappointed, upset fans. I was gutted when both of my shows were cancelled, but I'd have felt even worse at the time, if I'd known that I'd never have another opportunity to see them in concert.
 
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