WILLIAMSBURG — Williamsburg’s Ken Ashby, Dick Smith, Cabot Wade, Maris Segal and John Tracy recently came together to record “Peace,” a Christmas album to help raise funds for Kiwanis this holiday season.
Tracy, Smith and Wade, known in Williamsburg as the Smith Wade Band, worked alongside Ashby and Segal to produce the new album. The album features 10 different holiday-themed originals written by the group.
“We all got together at the beginning of the year and said, ‘hey, let’s get together and write a song.’ We wrote a Christmas song, and then we said, ‘let’s write another,’ and over the year, it just came together,” Ashby said.
According to Segal, the album is not necessarily tied to specific traditions of the holiday season, but rather, was inspired by the emotions the holiday season brings out in people.
“The sense of the album itself is really about fun, joy, play and connecting on every level. So often, the holidays come and some people struggle through it. The whole thing for us, our focus is about connecting, and how do we connect? One of the things that is really cool is music is a great connector. It’s unapologetic, it touches everyone in some way, it offers opportunities for everyone to feel whatever their feeling, and to create that kind of expression for a holiday album is to really give voice to how people really connect and feel over the holiday season,” Segal said.
From a song about a runaway Roomba vacuum that vacuums up all the Christmas decorations, to “Peace,” the title track that includes 10 different languages in the song, to a tune centered around Hanukkah, Ashby said there is something for everyone.
Throughout the recording and writing process, the group applied artificial intelligence, which they said added even more special experiences during the production.
“We wrote all the lyrics, melodies, and chord progressions, so it was all original. Then we teamed up with an AI platform to enhance it. After all the iterations, we found that when we landed on what we wanted, we knew it was how it was supposed to sound,” Ashby explained.
Segal and Ashby, both members of the local Kiwanis Club, wanted a way to give back to the community through the album.
The album, on sale for $9.99, will see $1 of every sale go to Kiwanis. An anonymous donor has agreed to match the dollar of every sale, so $2 of each album download will benefit the local community.
“Kiwanis is doing incredible work with kids and this album is just one of the ways that we get to show up and be in support of other people,” Segal said.
The album is available for purchase and download here.