Having released no less than six charting Christmas albums during his career including one of the Top Ten selling Christmas albums of all time (1958's Merry Christmas, which hit the Christmas charts 16 times!), Johnny Mathis has probably sold more Christmas records than any other artist in pop music history. And, with a half dozen releases to date on our Real Gone Music label, he is also by far our biggest selling pop vocalist. Add to that the fact that Christmas music is such a big part of what we do here at Real Gone and you can see why the chance to do a truly comprehensive collection of his Christmas music has been a glimmer in our eye ever since we started the label back in 2011. Now, after years of preparation, we are finally ready to release such a collection...and it's turned out even better than we'd hoped! Not only does The Complete Christmas Collection 1958-2010 contain all five Christmas albums Johnny recorded for Columbia and Mercury prior to his 2013 Christmas release--including Merry Christmas, 1963's Sounds of Christmas, 1969's Give Me Your Love for Christmas, 1986's Christmas Eve with Johnny Mathis, and 2002's The Christmas Album, all of which charted--but it also includes many more non-LP tracks than we knew even existed before we started delving into the project. In fact, a full 16 of the 71 tracks--including duets with Bette Midler and Gladys Knight & the Pips--on this 3-CD set are rarities that did not appear on the albums, and two of them are newly discovered tracks! What's more, the array of talent on these recordings is staggering (Johnny only worked with the best): among the producers, arrangers and conductors behind the scenes here are Mitch Miller, Percy Faith, Don Costa, Glenn Osser, Ernie Freeman, Gene Page, Jack Gold, Ray Ellis, and Henry Mancini. Little wonder, then, that Johnny's Christmas music has been beloved for generations, and here it appears complete with fresh remastering by Mike Piacentini at Sony's Battery Studios under the watchful eye of Sony producer Didier Deutsch, and packaged inside an eight-panel wallet sporting photos and notes by Joe Marchese drawn from an exclusive interview with Johnny Mathis himself. If there's one indispensable Christmas release for this season and the seasons beyond, this is it!
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