Aly Aleigha tried to write a Christmas song under pressure and found stillness
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Singer-songwriter Aly Aleigha was on a deadline to write an original Christmas song that didn’t yet exist.
Aleigha, originally from Wisconsin and now a performer throughout the Midwest, was commissioned to turn Advent, the period of four Sundays leading up to Christmas, into a song.
The song was commissioned for an Advent series created by Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest who serves as director of youth and young adult ministry in the Diocese of Duluth and Newman Center chaplain at the University of Minnesota Duluth, to help people prepare for Christmas. It was one of two new songs she wrote for the series.
As Aleigha knew well, the weeks before the holiday can be emotionally packed. Everything from travel, presents, church services and get-togethers with family and friends can be distracting.
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“It can be really easy to get caught up in just the chaos of it,” Aleigha said. “I’m super guilty of it.”
The goal for the song, named “Waiting Well,” was simple: slow listeners down. “What’s important in life what's precious. Let’s hang on to that,” she described.
This month, she and her band brought their Christmas setlist across Wisconsin, playing “Waiting Well” and other holiday-themed hits live.
“If we woke up on Christmas morning and there were no fancy lights, there was no special cookies or meals, there’s no smells like everything we associate with Christmas,” she asked audiences in Cameron, Wis., during her first show of the tour, “if none of that was there and we woke up on Christmas morning, would everything be worth it?"
At this performance, she played a stripped-down version of the indie-folk song, which usually has many moving parts.
Against the clock
The production process of a commissioned piece has a shorter window.
That didn’t keep Aleigha from thinking up ideas to make the song richer. Regardless of the imposing deadline, she could not stop brainstorming.
“Brett Winters, who did the production side of things — incredible. He pulled some all-nighters getting this done,” Aleigha said. “We were in crunch time.”
She wanted to add big lifts: a choir and strings. Winters didn’t shy away. Aleigha asked for a choir, and her mother put out a call to community members she knew loved to sing. It was an open call to show up at the church and record.
The turnout, Aleigha said, felt like a Christmas miracle.
"So many people showed up. And I was just like, overwhelmed by that, like, the amount of people who want to be involved in this project. That was so special to me," she said.
A similar situation happened with the string players, who reached out just as this project was hitting crunch time. They wanted to collaborate, so Aleigha thought, “Why wait?”
They threw strings on the piece all the way from Philadelphia.
Once Aleigha heard all the pieces together, she knew the high-risk additions had paid off, she said.
“I asked, ‘What if I make it a little bit more jazzy and more of an actual Christmas song,’ instead of just, like, I don’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I just started kind of playing around with it a little more freely and not trying to force it, and then that’s when it came out. And I was like, ‘OK, this is gold.’”
"Waiting Well" by Aly Aleigha is out now. Listen to it below.
