JOY! COMMUNITY! AMBITIOUS! FUN! REVERENT & IRREVERENT! are just some of the words that we associate with our collaborative project Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony! We, is Jennifer Kimball, Rose Polenzani, Laura Cortese, Rose Cousins, Jenna Moynihan, Valerie Thompson, Brittany Haas and Natalie Haas. In celebration of the sixth year of putting on our holiday show at Club Passim in Cambridge, MA, we are releasing HARK, our debut recording of 14 songs. Jennifer Kimball produced and we recorded mostly live at Q Division in Somerville, MA. The project has come into being both from a deep love of winter songs and a deep love of singing together. One part secular, one sacred, the music has it's toes dipped in all kinds of genres from Celtic to classical, folk to pop, gregorian chant to indie rock. We are recreating the soundtrack for the season for ourselves and for our community. We've reharmonized and rearranged familiar songs like "Joy to the World," "Jingle Bells" and "The Holly and the Ivy," adding to this repertoire songs which talk about the cold and/or which just make us feel wintery like "Snow Days" by the band Real Estate, and "In the Cold, Cold Night" by Jack White. In addition there are new songs on HARK by Cortese, Kimball and Brittany Haas. Rose Polenzani's spare arrangement on glockenspiel for "Silent Night," sung by special guest Anais Mitchell, is magic. Natalie Haas's arrangement of three pieces from The Nutcracker Suite will knock your socks off - and it doesn't sound like the pops it sounds like the Haas sisters with Cortese & Thompson! We're not afraid to tackle classics and turn them upside down or segue right from hymns into jigs: "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" becomes a round, "Christmastime is Here" with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" on top of it, "Winter Wonderland" reimagined in a minor key, "The Holly and the Ivy" morphs into "Life is Good Jig!" You haven't quite heard these songs this way before! And yes, while HARK is about collaboration and community, it's also about ladytime. And it's about coming together to do one of the things we love most in the world - to sing harmony, challenge ourselves, bring out the best in each other and fiddle our way through this huge, joyful but sometimes very dark holiday.