Alanis Morissette Turns Five Years of Holiday Covers Into an Album

Since 2020, Alanis Morissette has spent each December releasing a single Christmas cover and then stepping back. That habit has now produced a full record. Good Weather for Immaculate Conception collects those seasonal one-offs and adds further interpretations and two original songs. It is out November 6 on Virgin’s Epiphany imprint.

The tracklist runs across familiar ground: “O Holy Night,” “Little Drummer Boy,” “River,” “Last Christmas,” “Silent Night.” What distinguishes it is who shows up. Brandi Carlile and Steve Martin appear together on “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem.” Martin Short turns up on “Merry Christmas.” Amythyst Kiah joins “Momma Mary,” Joy Oladokun sings on “Silent Night,” and “O Tannenbaum” is credited to Trans Voices. A holiday album built on that kind of gathering is less a stylistic statement than a room full of people Morissette wanted in it.

The release lands in a year when she has been visible outside her own catalogue. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in January, appeared unannounced at Olivia Rodrigo’s first Daisy Chain Fields festival to duet on “Ironic,” and sang “Uninvited” with Carlile at Red Rocks last month, after Carlile had covered it at Newport Folk Festival in July. Her last studio album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, came out in 2020. Between that silence and this, the Christmas songs are the record of how she has chosen to keep working.