Kathy Mattea Christmas Concert

Show Date: December 18, 2006 at 8:00 p.m.

Kathy Mattea, the two-time Grammy winner and Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year is back at the Paramount by popular demand. Thirteen years after winning a Grammy award for Good News, a collection of Christmas songs, Mattea returns to the subject with a holiday program including songs from Joy For Christmas Day. Her Christmas concert highlights the “good news” of the holiday and its spiritual message with a thoughtful blend of old favorites and new songs while ranging even more widely across musical boundaries. Known for filling her shows with heartfelt emotion, Mattea’s holiday concert delivers a special treat.

Whether she’s adapting the classic “Angels We Have Heard On High” or arranging a fresh new holiday song, Mattea delivers a natural, unforced enthusiasm and powerful spirituality that speaks to both the joy and reverence of the Christmas celebration. Good News and Joy for Christmas Day are, she says, “more about the spiritual side of Christmas, and not so much about the holiday”.

Twice named Female Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Association, Kathy Mattea carved out a role for herself in the late 1980s and 1990s as a sensitive yet energetic artist at ease both with country tradition and free-ranging innovation. "At the time I broke through, country music had narrowed so much," she recalls. "I was part of an influx of a kind of new breed, where the format opened up again in order to survive". The West Virginia native won her first Grammy in 1990, earning the Best Female Country Vocal Performance Award for her moving “Where’ve You Been,” co-written by husband Jon Vezner. With close to thirty Top 40 country hits, including 15 top ten songs, four Number One entries, five gold albums and a platinum-selling greatest hits compilation, she is among the most successful women in the genre’s history, yet her creative spirit has led her to explore musical territory extending well beyond its confines. According to Mattea she “was exposed to all this cool Celtic and world music. I began to feel like the next generation was coming up, and I could either choose to play in that arena, or go and see what else might be out there for me. I began to dream of making music without all these rules. I wanted to experiment with some of the sounds I had been exposed to during my trips to Scotland. Adding unexpected elements, like traditional Celtic instruments or more ethnic drumming to our shows has allowed us more diversity”.