Hollywood Christmas and the Room in Richard Williams' Recording
The Utah Composer Recorded Every Arrangement Twice, Once Sung and Once Instrumental
Forty tracks. Seventy-four minutes. Twenty of those tracks are the songs, and the other twenty are the same charts again with the vocal taken out. Hollywood Christmas is a Christmas record built the way a screen composer builds a score, and once you notice that, the whole thing reorganises itself.
Richard Williams’ music is in the playlist below, and his catalogue of coverage lives on the Richard Williams artist profile. Hollywood Christmas reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Put it on, then read the rest.
How Hollywood Christmas Builds Its Medleys From Cues and Numbered Parts
Richard Williams is an award-winning composer for film, games and animation, based in Provo, Utah. The album he released on 21 October 2022 carries that training openly.
Look at the running order. The Holiday Season is Pt. 1. Happy Holiday is Pt. 2, and it lasts forty-four seconds. Frosty the Snowman is Pt. 3 and lasts six. These are not songs in the album sense. They are cues, the short connective passages a composer writes to move a scene from one place to the next. So he sequences them into medleys that run continuously rather than stopping and restarting.
Meanwhile, the same logic governs the longer material. Jingle Bells appears as Pt. 2 and again as Pt. 4, bracketing Frosty. Then Let It Snow splits across Pt. 1 and Pt. 3, with Up on the Housetop sitting between them. By contrast, a conventional holiday album cuts each standard as a discrete performance and orders them by tempo. This one treats the standards as thematic material and cuts between them the way a film cuts between shots.
What the Structure Costs, and What the Ensemble Gains
That is a real structural decision, and it costs something. Nothing on the first half invites you to pull it out and drop it into a playlist on its own. The forty-four-second fragments make no sense in isolation. What they do is hold a room together for an hour.
The ensemble work supports it. Rather than a single frontperson, the big band writing carries a rotating cast of guest vocalists. Alex Stiles, Rebecca Lopez, Taylor Miranda, Hayley Kirkland, Chelsea Brooke Olson, Dmitry Noskov and the vocal group Company B all take turns, and the jazz trumpeter and singer Benny Benack III appears on Let It Snow.
Handing each standard to a different voice is closer to casting than to featuring. It also keeps the arrangements, rather than any one performer, at the centre of the record. Still, the effect is a record with no obvious lead, and that is clearly deliberate.
Why the Twenty Instrumental Takes Are the Real Statement
Then there is the second half. He presents every one of those twenty arrangements again as an instrumental. Not a karaoke stem and not a remix, but rather the same recorded performance with the vocal absent. That leaves the horn writing, the rhythm section and the arrangement itself fully exposed.
Indeed, the decision is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. Most artists record an instrumental version because a client asked for one. Releasing all twenty alongside the vocal takes says something different. It says the arrangements are the work, and the singers are guests on top of them.
The AcousticMusic.News curator team: “The instrumental half is the tell. Strip the vocal off a standard and you find out very quickly whether there was an arrangement underneath or just an accompaniment. On Hollywood Christmas there is an arrangement underneath, and the second twenty tracks are effectively Williams showing his working.”
Where to Hear Hollywood Christmas and the Rest of Richard Williams
The obvious comparison is the crooner Christmas record, and the album invites it. Nat King Cole set the template with The Christmas Song, which appears here in both a sung and an instrumental reading. Michael Bublé is the modern version of that idea, a single voice carried by a big band across a full album.
However, Hollywood Christmas does not work that way, and the difference is the point. Because there is no single voice at the centre of it, the balance shifts. The through-line is the writing, and the guest vocalists rotate around it. For a listener that changes what the record is for. It holds a room for an hour rather than showcasing a performer for forty minutes.
Finally, it suits the use it clearly serves. Programme it as a continuous hour, and the medleys and cue-length fragments do what they were written to do. Shuffle it and they will not.
The album is on Spotify, and the wider catalogue sits on his Spotify artist page, on Apple Music and on SoundCloud. Williams posts on Instagram, Facebook and X, his scoring work is on his YouTube channel, and there is more at his official site.
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