For over a decade, Lindsey Stirling has enchanted audiences across the globe by performing a certain spellbinding magic with her electronic violin, dreaming up an exquisitely composed yet boldly inventive sound entirely her own. On her new album Snow Waltz, the classically trained musician/songwriter/dancer/author finds herself fully in her element, sharing a selection of holiday classics and original songs that evoke intense emotion through her immersive arrangements and mesmerizing melodies. The follow-up to her debut holiday album Warmer in the Winter—a 2017 release whose hit single “Carol of the Bells” made history as the only instrumental song ever to reach the Top 10 at AC Radio—Snow Waltz emerges as a singular new entry in the holiday-music canon, once again proving Stirling’s extraordinary gift as an instrumental storyteller.
“On my first holiday album I toyed with more traditional Christmas sounds like big-band music, but this time I wanted to give the songs a more whimsical, pixie-like feeling that’s quintessentially me,” says Stirling. “It’s always a challenge to put your own stamp on a classic song that’s been recorded hundreds of times, and I really loved experimenting with different approaches and making sure that every song felt completely unique to who I am as an artist.”
Stirling’s sixth full-length and first album since 2019’s Artemis (a No. 1 entry on Billboard’s US Top Classical Albums and US Top Dance/Electronic Albums charts), Snow Waltz took shape at her home studio in Los Angeles, where she mainly worked with longtime collaborators like producer Mark Maxwell and orchestrator Stephen Anderson. “One of the more positive takeaways of the pandemic was learning how to record myself, so that now I can capture ideas right when they come to me,” notes Stirling, who executive-produced Snow Waltz with Gladius (a Grammy-nominated producer/songwriter who’s worked with pop superstars like Demi Lovato and Justin Bieber). “I was able to harness my own creativity on the fly instead of having to wait until it was time to meet with a producer, and because of that there’s a sense of freedom that I think you can hear in all the songs.”
A dazzling showcase for the kaleidoscopic musicality first displayed on Stirling’s 2012 self-titled debut (a gold-certified effort featuring her platinum-selling smash single “Crystallize”), Snow Waltz takes its title from an original piece that perfectly exemplifies that unbridled creativity. “‘Snow Waltz’ came from thinking about that period of time between Halloween and Christmas where the two seasons overlap,” she explains. “I wanted to create something in the same world as The Nightmare Before Christmas or the Harry Potter movies, where there’s sort of a Christmas-y feeling alongside all the spookiness.” Rooted in her ineffably expressive violin work and graced with so many cinematic details (darkly sweeping percussion, lilting flute melodies, bright and sprightly glockenspiel tones), “Snow Waltz” immediately conjures that delightfully eerie mood, wholly embodying the limitless imagination at the heart of Stirling’s artistry.
When it came to reinterpreting timeless holiday songs for Snow Waltz, Stirling tapped into the same boundless and unfettered ingenuity she brought to the title track. On “Joy to the World,” for instance, she joined forces with Gladius and Anderson to create a gloriously stomping, Celtic-inspired take on the 18th century Christmas carol. “Celtic was always my favorite music to play when I was younger; the rhythms felt way more exciting to me than the classical music you tend to perform in violin lessons,” Stirling says. “As I was choosing songs for the album, ‘Joy to the World’ really spoke to my Celtic soul, and it was so much fun to put together something that bounces so quickly from major to minor and back again.”