How To Build a Holiday Setlist You Won’t Hate
It seems like Christmas music is as unavoidable as the winter weather this time of year. Love it or hate it, you’ll probably be asked to perform a holiday song at some point in your singing career, maybe even an entire seasonal set. If you’ve never put together your own setlist before, it can feel a little daunting. Even if you’re a seasoned pro, the polarizing nature of holiday music can make it challenging to build a great repertoire. So how do you create a holiday setlist that both you and your audience will enjoy?
Setlist Building Basics
Regardless of what genre of music you’re playing, there’s an art to putting together a collection of songs that can capture and keep your audience’s attention - especially in the 21st century where you’re competing with smartphones for your listeners’ attention. Being engaging doesn’t require pyrotechnics or a choreographed dance routine, but it does require some planning and practice.
In general, your first and last song will be what your audience remembers about your performance. Make those songs your show stoppers, whatever that means for your genre and style. The start and end of your set will determine what impression your listeners walk away with, so in addition to being some of your most engaging numbers, they should also be some of your best performances. Choose songs that sit comfortably in your vocal range and spend a little extra time on them while practicing to make sure your performance is confident and consistent.
The songs between your show stoppers are still important, even if your audience won’t have as distinct a memory of them. Variety is crucial to holding your listeners’ interest; as a rule of thumb, you should try to alternate tempos and keys between songs. For example, singing three downtempo songs in the key of G back to back is going to feel less like three unique performances and more like an endless drone. Varying the sentiment of the lyric, the groove, or even the instrumentation between songs can help capture and keep your audience’s attention. Remember to also include a couple of ”Sing Along / Audience Participation” moments in the setlist, especially for holiday shows.
Tailoring Your Songs to Your Audience - and Your Voice
Your specific song choices should be guided by both where you’re singing and who you’re singing for. In the context of a holiday show, whether you choose secular holiday songs, carols, or hymns will have a lot to do with the demographics of your audience. You probably don’t want to do your sauciest rendition of Santa Baby for your grandmother’s church friends at her Wednesday night bible study, nor your most solemn performance of Gloria in Excelsis Deo for a rowdy holiday event at a bar. If you’re not sure what kind of music a particular venue usually books, spend some time researching other artists who have recently played there to understand what genres the venue is looking for.
Pro Tip: You can adapt this technique to find venues that would be a good fit for your particular style by looking up an artist with a similar sound to yours and researching where they’ve recently played.
Of course, you should always make sure your song choices fit your voice just as well as they do your audience. Even if a big diva tune is perfect for the event you’re playing, don’t add it to the setlist if you don’t have a big diva range. Understanding your instrument and abilities speaks more to your skill as a singer than a poor rendition of a technically challenging song. Whether you have a band, backing tracks, or are self-accompanying; make sure your songs are in the best key for your voice and that anyone who needs it has music in the correct key.
Pro Tip: As you grow your repertoire, it’s a good practice to keep track of what key you perform each song in. A spreadsheet, notebook, or binder of accurately transposed charts and sheet music are all techniques we’ve seen professional musicians use to organize their repertoire.
Once you’ve selected your songs, picked your keys, and put everything in the right order, it’ time to plan your transitions. Whether you stop and talk to the audience or just roll right into the next song is up to your style and what type of event you’re playing; but if you do plan to talk between songs, figure out what you’ll say in advance and remember that those spoken parts are as much a part of the performance as the songs they’re introducing. A sloppy transition can lose your listener’s attention just as fast as a poorly performed musical number. Speak clearly, be engaging, and act like you’re having fun and glad to be there. The energy you project from the stage will shape your audience’s experience, so if you seem bored or disinterested you’ll find yourself playing to a bored or disinterested crowd.
How to Make Holiday Music Fun Again
Now that you know the basics of building a setlist and the importance of variety, how do you create an interesting collection of songs when your audience has been inundated with holiday standards for weeks? Curating a setlist with novelty and variety can feel like an impossible challenge with Christmas music blaring in nearly every shop, restaurant, and grocery store. Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You is so overplayed that a pub in Australia recently made international news when it banned patrons from selecting the song on the jukebox before December 1st.
Luckily, even an overplayed song can feel new if you make your rendition of it unique. Try changing the groove of a Christmas classic, speeding up or slowing down your favorite carol, completely changing the genre, or using an unconventional instrument as your accompaniment. The notorious All I Want for Christmas is You could become a melancholy ballad by slowing it down and flipping it into a minor key. In both music and comedy, subverting expectations is an essential part of engaging your audience, whether through an unexpected chord change or a unique rendition of a song the listener thinks they know by heart. Not only will your listeners appreciate the reinvention of a recognizable song, it can make performing a tired standard more fun for you as well.
Another option is to look globally for holiday songs that you and your audience might not be familiar with. For example, Six White Boomers may be a Christmas classic in Australia, but it’s completely novel to many American listeners. It can be a great opportunity to learn about holiday traditions around the world and add variety to your repertoire. Plus, a song about Christmas in the Outback is going to be far more memorable than the 30th version of Silent Night the crowd has heard in the last month.
You may also want to consider adding a few “anti-holiday” tunes to your list. River by Joni Mitchell is a great, sad song about heartbreak and loneliness during the holidays. Surprisingly, the original lyrics to Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas were so cutting that Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra had the lyricist rewrite a verse before they recorded it. Telling the story of the song before performing the original lyric could serve as an engaging transition during your set.
The Sure-Fire Way to Make Your Set Unique
If you want to guarantee your set will have unique songs that haven’t been played to death, write a few of your own! Songwriting is a skill in and of itself, but with some patience, practice, and inspiration anyone can write their own holiday song (or any kind of song, for that matter). If this is your first songwriting experience, remember to have fun and do your best to ignore your inner critic; if this is your 10,000th songwriting experience, remember to have fun and do your best to ignore your inner critic. Maybe you’ll create something you perform for the rest of your career or maybe you’ll write something better next year and you’ll forget this song even existed in the first place; either way, enjoy the process and be proud of what you accomplish. Meanwhile, enjoy discovering new gems in the ever-expanding collection of Holiday songs and have fun turning these into your own performance masterpieces.
Now’s the Time to Schedule a Lesson and Build Your Repertoire
Whichever holidays you observe this winter, however, you celebrate, and whoever you celebrate with; we hope this season is warm, joyous, and full of good music. If you want help building your repertoire or want to learn the fundamentals of singing, speaking, performing, or songwriting, reach out and set up a lesson with Zelda. Have a safe and happy holiday and don’t forget to love your voice!
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