Happy Xmas is the first Christmas album by Eric Clapton as well as his twenty-first solo studio album which was released in October 2018. It includes 13 covers of Christmas-themed songs (15 on the European re-release), both well-known and relatively obscure ones, arranged in a predominantly blues style, and one new composition by Clapton and producer Simon Climie.
During the 23-minute television special A Clapton Christmas, which includes excerpts from a longer interview with producer/musician Simon Climie, Clapton says that the original inspiration for the album came from his wife Melia about three years before the album was produced. She had been listening to the Christmas-themed playlists which her husband created every year on his mobile phone for the end-of-year holiday season; one day, she left him a message on his phone: “Why don’t you do a Christmas album?” Clapton was initially reluctant, as many of his favourite artists had done likewise before him, but he was convinced after he started working with pianist and keyboard player Walt Richmond who came up with unconventional harmonizations and arrangements for most of the tracks.
“For Love on Christmas Day” was written in early 2018 as “Living in a Dream World”, when Clapton completed a fragmentary tune by Simon Climie and wrote lyrics to it. At the time, the album was supposed to be a regular studio album rather than a Christmas one. Upon deciding to make it such, Clapton changed two lines of lyrics in the last verse – the only ones which actually include the word “Christmas”.
“Home for the Holidays” and “It’s Christmas” are taken from American soul singer Anthony Hamilton’s 2014 holiday-themed album, also called Home for the Holidays. Clapton discovered his music on Spotify and called him “the best soul singer on the planet”.
The song “Christmas in My Hometown”, according to Clapton’s comments on a flexi disc included with the deluxe edition of the album, was discovered by him on a Christmas compilation album, which he found by scouring the Internet while looking for unusual Christmas songs to cover; in this case, it was a country album, which included Gene Autry among its featured artists. The original version of this song, recorded by its writer Sonny James in 1954, sounded to Clapton like a pub song and reminded him of a scene he saw on a TV documentary, depicting a group of Romani people singing and having fun in a pub, so he arranged it in that style.
