Angels From the Realms of Glory

“Angels From the Realms of Glory” has long been one of my favorite Christmas songs. It was originally a poem published in a newspaper on Christmas Eve in the early 1800s! The effective yet succinctness of the message and form of the song, paired with the harmonization, are literally some of my favorite things that make me excited about a piece of music. The fact that I have hardly heard it performed in churches and have never heard any recorded versions of this song, in popular music or otherwise, has always surprised me.

I love that I got to bring a very full spectrum of Rrinaco sounds into this version. Having both Casey Campbell and Kurt Stephenson track this live with me and Jeremy Stephens was really special and grounding for me because Kurt and Casey were both part of my first foray into arranging my original songs back in college. Kevin Buchanan’s percussion on this really made it feel like an epic Christmas song. And interestingly, while many super old traditional songs typically get “modernized” by timing changes or lyric alterations in today’s age, the arrangement of this song is preserved from the hymn book, so anyone who is familiar with this song or has the music to it can sing or play along just as it’s written, just by transposing it to the key of D! The duet feature with the instrumentation makes it different than anything I’ve ever recorded. The whole thing feels like it exists outside of a specific time period to me, which is really one of my favorite things to do. I see it as a song that bridges the gap between bluegrass and more traditional Christmas songs on the Christmas mix playlist! —Corrina Rose Logston Stephens