Growing up in St. John’s, Tim Baker’s winters were coloured by two sounds: Wind and snow plows. It was all you could hear some nights, whispering beyond the crackle of a fireplace or the quiet of a bedroom, as a blanket of white covered the foggy city. It was a “comforting feeling,” the former Hey Rosetta! frontman tells The Coast. Much like Baker’s new album, Full Rainbow of Light.
Baker’s first release since 2023’s Along the Mountain Road EP, the 12-track offering is an unlikely one from the 42-year-old: A Christmas album that he admits he “never really set out” to write.
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“I’d been a bit hesitant to even tell people I was working on it, because I think sometimes Christmas music can feel… commercial, and I really didn’t want it to feel that way,” he says. “Mostly, I have a fair bit of free time around the holidays, and I like to sit at the piano and write.”
You won’t find the usual “Jingle Bells” fare on Full Rainbow. Instead of reworking the classics, Baker sought to tap into the “big feelings” of the season with an array of original songs that span from Tibb’s Eve to New Year’s Eve. The end result is like a fresh layer of snow: Both familiar and wonderfully new. There are fiddles and organs. Uilleann pipes and glockenspiels. The mood swings from piano-backed ballads of love and longing (“It’s Tonight”) to foot-stomping moments of unbridled joy (“Light the Light”).
“There’s high highs and low lows,” Baker tells The Coast. “It’s a time of year where you have… lots of nostalgia and lots of memories, and there’s lots of meaning.
“As a kid, it was the king of days,” he adds. “I remember being a kid, and if I was feeling upset or worried or something, my mom would say to me, ‘Just pretend it’s Christmas Eve.’ And you know, I could almost reach that, even as a kid—like, ‘Oh, right, there’s days like that. There’s days that are that good.’”
Even now, Baker isn’t immune to winter’s charms.
“We loaded out of the show the other night in Corner Brook, and it was snowing big, fat flakes,” he says. “And it’s hard not to feel a bit of childlike [wonder], even now as a crusty old musician—it’s kind of magical, you know?”
To mark the album’s release, Baker is touring across Atlantic Canada and Ontario in the lead-up to a pair of homecoming shows in St. John’s on Dec 20 and 21. Cape Breton folk rockers Villages are joining Baker and his band on tour—including for part of their set.
“To have nine of us on stage playing,” he says, “is extremely fun.”
Tickets have already sold out to Baker’s Halifax show at the Light House Arts Centre on Thursday, Dec 5. But there’s always next Christmas, he adds.
“If people really take to this record, I’d be happy to make it a tradition.”
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This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.