Sounds of the Season: The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection – Taylor Swift
The year is 2007, and Taylor Swift is still a country singer. While Taylor has come a long way from country ingenue to pop music superstar, it’s still fun to look back at her country roots, especially during the Christmas season thanks to her EP Sounds of the Season.
Taylor’s holiday EP featured six songs, including Wham!’s “Last Christmas” and “Santa Baby”, plus two originals written by Taylor, “Christmases When You Were Mine” and “Christmas Must Be Something More”. The songs definitely strayed more towards the country genre, heavy with fiddles and acoustic guitars. Reviews of the album were all favorable, with one of the only critiques being that it was too short! Taylor doesn’t do anything crazy original, but the EP is laid back and perfect for those lazy, snowy afternoons spent inside cuddled up under a blanket.
Since Taylor’s popularity has only gotten bigger every year since she first released Sounds of the Season, the EP was re-released the following year on iTunes and Amazon after getting a limited release its first year. It was released again in 2009 in Target stores across the US, which helped it peak at #14 on both the Top Country Albums and Top Holiday Albums charts, two years after being released for the first time. The EP has since sold over 1.1 million copies in the United States as of last Christmas.
It seems like there are a bunch of country Christmas albums, but it would be interesting to see how different a Christmas album from Taylor would be now that she’s a pop star. Would she still have lots of acoustic guitar, or would it be more synth-pop à la Kylie Minogue?