Alanis Morissette's first holiday album is mostly other people's songs
Fourteen tracks, twelve borrowed, two hers, and a guest list doing much of the work. Her first holiday record is a covers album with two reasons to exist.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 10 2026 · 4 min readGood Weather for Immaculate Conception is Alanis Morissette's first holiday record, and the surprise is how little of her is in it. Fourteen tracks, out Nov. 6 on Epiphany Music/Virgin Music. Two of them are new songs she wrote. The other twelve are carols and covers, shared out among Brandi Carlile, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Joy Oladokun, Amythyst Kiah and Trans Voices. The two she wrote are the point.
She came to the holiday album late. Morissette started in Canada with two dance-pop records, Alanis in 1991 and Now Is the Time in 1992, moved to Los Angeles, and then made Jagged Little Pill in 1995, which took five Grammys including Album of the Year and has sold more than 60 million records worldwide across her catalog. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie followed in 1998, and from Under Rug Swept onward she produced herself. So-Called Chaos, Flavors of Entanglement, Havoc and Bright Lights, Such Pretty Forks in the Road in 2020, The Storm Before the Calm in 2022. In June she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. The writing is the thing, and that is the tension this album walks into.
The holiday record is a habit formalized. Since 2020 she has turned up each December to cover a Christmas song, and this set gathers those renditions alongside further covers and the two originals. It opens with "O Holy Night." "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem," the first single, is out now and features Carlile and Steve Martin. Her Butterfly With a Machete residency returns to Los Angeles on Nov. 5 at YouTube Theater, the night before the album lands.
The tracklist carries the record's logic in plain sight. Most of it is carol repertoire: "O Holy Night," "What Child Is This?", "Little Drummer Boy," "Ave Maria," "Silent Night," "O Tannenbaum." Three are other people's pop, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," Joni Mitchell's "River," Wham!'s "Last Christmas." The rest is hers, and there are exactly two of those, at track 2 and track 8. These are songs written to be sung by a voice with size to it, and the whole sequence is arranged around the one she has.
"To an Empath at Christmas Time" is the first of the new pair and sits second, which is where a record puts a song it trusts. It is also the only title here that addresses one person instead of a season. "Christmas on the Dancefloor," at eight, is the other, and the only song on the album that promises a floor rather than a table. She wrote both. Both land before the guest run starts in earnest, and neither is followed by a third.
From track six on, the record becomes a series of handoffs. Carlile and Steve Martin join "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem." Amythyst Kiah takes "Momma Mary" at ten. Track eleven puts "O Tannenbaum" in front of Trans Voices, the U.K.'s first professional trans choir. Joy Oladokun sings "Silent Night" at thirteen, and Martin Short closes the album with "Merry Christmas." Five of the last nine tracks are shared. It keeps the back half moving, and it hands the record to other people.
The flaw is arithmetic. Fourteen tracks, two of them written by a woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame four months before release, and nothing of her own after track eight. Between "Christmas on the Dancefloor" and the closer sit six straight covers. Carlile, Kiah, Oladokun and Trans Voices are good company, but they are company, and an album that signs off on a duet called "Merry Christmas" has decided to end light rather than end on anything she wrote. Holiday records are allowed to be covers records. This one is nearly all of one.
It is for the household that plays one Christmas album a year and wants a real voice at the center of it. It sits with the standard carol records you put on at dinner, not with Jagged Little Pill, and nothing here is trying to do what "You Oughta Know" did. If you came for the confession, this is not the drop. If you want the voice and a table full of guests, it does the job for six weeks and then goes back in the box.
Three out of five. Fine rather than strong: well chosen, well placed, and thinner in her own writing than a fourteen-track record by this writer has any right to be. "To an Empath at Christmas Time" and "Christmas on the Dancefloor" are the two you will return to, and the only two that could only be hers. She plays YouTube Theater on Nov. 5, the night before this arrives. Those two songs could carry a whole record; here they get two slots.
