Angus Gill Breaks Down Every Track On Christmas EP ‘The Gilly Season’

2022 Golden Guitar Winner, Angus Gill is one of most exciting and prodigious acts on the Australian Country Music scene. He's a songwriter's songwriter, a gifted producer and a consummate performer and comedian. With four critically acclaimed, ARIA chart topping studio albums and seven #1 radio singles to his name, Gill is one of the youngest Australians to have performed on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

His fifth studio release, The Gilly Season, released November 10, is an exciting collection of fresh, original Christmas songs. From the wry and witty appeal of Cheapskate Christmas and Mistletoey, to the fun Present Time and Don't Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle (featuring Melinda Schneider), to the heartfelt ballad First Christmas Without You, Gill perfectly captures the gamut of emotions that accompany The Silly Season. Other rather, The Gilly Season!

Produced, engineered, and mixed by Gill at Hot Plate Studios and mastered by Jeff McCormack at The Music Cellar, Gill assembled an A-team of musicians including Stuie French (Guitars), Jeff Taylor and Russell Dick (Piano), Michel Rose (Pedal Steel), Glenn Wilson (Drums), McCormack (Bass), TC Cassidy and Templeton Thompson (Backing Vocals) and Pixie Jenkins providing character voices for the album.

Gill says, “I decided to write The Gilly Season as I love Christmas music, but I haven’t heard a lot of original Christmas songs lately. It was a great creative challenge to come up with these songs and by tapping into my own Christmas experiences, I think we were able to find fresh ideas.”

We’re so delighted to bring you this exclusive track by track, as Angus Gill talks us through each individual track: the creation, sentiment, and everything in between.

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1. Cheapskate Christmas

Every year at Christmas, Nan would always turn up to our house with a big old sack overflowing with presents. She’d dole them out to us like a deranged Mrs. Claus and watch our faces to see how delightfully disappointed we were! Somehow, we thought they’d get better, but we were clearly kidding ourselves! My good friend, Nashville songwriter and comedian, Bill Whyte and I wrote this song about every crappy Christmas present we’ve ever been given. 

2. Don’t Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle [feat. Melinda Schneider] 

Don’t Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle is a sleek combination of witty and silly all rolled into one festive package! It’s actually quite a hard song to sing, due to the tempo and the deliberate tongue twisting nature of the words. I wanted to write a song like this, as I’ve often covered The Auctioneer & I’ve Been Everywhere in my shows. I wrote it as a duet, with my good friends and collaborators Bill DiLuigi and Kirsti Manna. I instantly had Melinda Schneider in mind to sing it with me, as I’ve always admired her as an artist and vocalist. Thankfully, she loved the song and agreed to do it with me. 

3. Mistletoey

For an idea like this, I thought it was only fitting to collaborate with Randy Brooks, who is best known as the writer of the Christmas smash hit, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I had the title first and thought it was quite an amusing idea to play off the two meanings of being “toey” at Christmas. It was a blast rhyming this with Randy! We managed to namecheck the Christmas song I loathe the most, Deck the Halls and include a scat section where I could release my inner Roger Miller. It’s pure fun! 

4. First Christmas Without You 

Christmas usually comes with a gamut of emotions: joy, happiness, anxiousness, excitement, but there’s also a melancholy side, thinking of the ones who would usually be there with us celebrating, but sadly can’t be. I wrote this in 2020, after losing my dear grandma. I walked outside on a rainy day and glanced over to grandma’s garden and thought, “this’ll be our first Christmas without you” and the song basically wrote itself. It’s a song very close to my heart because it’s 100% true. 

5. Present Time 

This was the catalyst for this original Christmas EP project, which is something I’ve always wanted to do and something you don’t see done too often. It’s a difficult thing to do, extracting fresh ideas and angles from well-trodden topics, such as Christmas, but with these songs, I think we’ve achieved a unique ‘Angus Gill’ take on Christmas. Stuie French and I wrote this song about 7 or 8 years ago. It captures the fun, silliness, bickering and humour that comes with a household of energetic kids waking up on Christmas Day. It features legendary Pixie Jenkins voicing the characters of mum, dad and the kids. 

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