PHILADELPHIA – Like any good Christmas tale, this one begins around an open fire. Except instead of chestnuts roasting over the flickering flame, three Philadelphia Eagles players and Eagles director of player development Connor Barwin knocked back a few beers and talked in Barwin’s backyard as summer 2022 neared.
Eagles offensive linemen Jason Kelce, Lane Johnson and Jordan Mailata surrounded the pit, ideas flowing, along with the libations. Charlie Hall, drummer for the band “War on Drugs,” was also there.
Kelce blurted out the idea of putting together a holiday album to Barwin, his longtime pal and former college and pro teammate, in the Eagles’ locker room one day. From there, Barwin gathered the crew. That was the fireside topic of conversation that evening. They walked away from the fire saying they’d do the album. They’d take the side project seriously. And they’d try to do some good with the fruits of their labor.
“That was sort of the direction and the tone we set two years ago,” Barwin told USA TODAY Sports, “and it’s really something that we carried through.”
Mailata said the fire may have been necessary despite the seasonal dissonance.
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“It was cold out … not really. But we sat out by the fire,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “I was like, ‘(Expletive), we’re really going to do this. Now we have to commit. Once our number’s called, we have to answer.’ Then the ball started rolling.”
Eighteen months later, the trio have released their second full-length holiday album, “A Philly Special Christmas Special,” a follow-up to last year’s debut, “A Philly Special Christmas.” Hall returned as the producer, with Barwin, a former NFL linebacker, as the executive producer. A duet between Kelce and his brother, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Rock Digital Song and Holiday Song sales charts with their song “Fairytale of Philadelphia,” a riff of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”
“I think everybody involved is super proud of how much people are connecting with it and enjoying it,” Barwin said. “There’s a lot of people that put in a lot of hard work behind the scenes, especially the guys. They put in a lot of effort to make it as good as they could get it.”
Last year, the album raised $1.25 million for 25 Philadelphia-area charities, mainly DonorsChoose – which helped local teachers secure school supplies – and the Children’s Crisis Treatment Center (CCTC). Sales for the second album have already doubled that mark with $2.5 million in records sold, and the funds will go to the CCTC and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where the money will help provide for the hospital’s ‘Snowflake Station,’ a place for families to pick out gifts.
“To be able to support families and kids that are sort of dealing with some of the hardest stuff during the holidays,’ Barwin said, ‘is what the guys wanted to do.”
Barwin and Kelce have been close since their collegiate playing days with the Cincinnati Bearcats. Kelce was a year behind Barwin, but Barwin remembers Kelce trying to convince him to try guitar back then. In 2022, when Kelce approached Barwin about a documentary chronicling the sunset of his NFL career – “KELCE” was released for streaming on Amazon this past fall – they created Vera Y, a production company that is behind the Christmas albums.
“They’re just both people who, when they put their minds to something, they do it and they do it well,” Hall told USA TODAY Sports. “And so as much as it was kind of a bit of a left-field thing. With those guys, I never had any hesitation or fear that it wouldn’t be thoughtful.”
Hall considers himself a “say yes” guy and is always up for a challenge. Everyone involved left him with zero doubt that this was a serious project.
“That it was not a goof,” Hall said. “This thing was never something that was intended to be a joke. It always came from a place from sincerity and love of music and of each other, so I was like, ‘Of course, yeah, let’s figure this out.’”
That left Hall with one question.
“How do you make a Christmas record?”
From idea to album
Hall and Barwin have known one another for nearly a decade, as the musician would play at functions for Barwin’s charity. He met Kelce through those events. But he didn’t know Mailata, who grew up singing with his Samoan family in New Zealand, or Johnson. They all hung out and passed a guitar around. Hall needed to figure out each individual’s vocal registers and proper keys in which they’d be comfortable belting out notes so he could arrange the songs accordingly. More importantly, he wanted to build rapport and trust with each other.
“Doing something like this, especially singing, it’s a really vulnerable thing,” Hall said. “It’s a really raw – you’re putting yourself out there. So I wanted to make sure that everybody was totally comfortable.”
For Hall, he wanted the group to choose songs that were important to them. He asked what they listened to as children and whether anything resonated with them now.
Ever the talented vocalist, Mailata performed on “The Masked Singer” last year. Johnson, an Oklahoma native, possesses a country-style croon. Barwin realized Kelce could actually sing when the two reunited on the Eagles in 2013 and they went to a public radio station in Philadelphia, where Kelce performed an Eric Church song.
“I wouldn’t have helped them if I didn’t know they could sing,” Barwin said. “But I didn’t know it would be as good as it is.”
When it came time to record in the studio – they recorded half of the first album elsewhere before putting the finishing touches on it at Elm Street Records, a Philadelphia staple – Barwin remembers steady improvement over the first few days.
“I remember saying to Jason, ‘Holy (expletive), if you guys keep going back to the studio, this thing is going to be incredible. Because every time you come back it’s getting so much better,’” Barwin said. “It’s a credit to them and sort of the effort they put in to try and keep getting better.”
That meant the second album would only be a step up, Barwin said.
“They were all really committed to it, wanted to sing new songs and put in a lot of effort to keep trying to get better over the summer,” he said.
The recording sessions, Hall said, were a combination of “unimaginable fun” and hard work.
“Those are the two things that define how those dudes roll,” he said.
It’s how they treated this endeavor, which “maybe on the one hand looks totally different than what they do on the field.” But there are actually a lot of analogs, Hall said.
“It’s being a part of a team, and everyone has their roles, and they all have different voices,” Hall said. “So everyone’s got their individual stuff they’re working on, but it’s all part of the greater, unified thing we’re doing. And it takes practice. And it takes working at it and figuring out what not to do and doing it again and getting better each time. That’s something these guys are so acutely tuned into, just improving. Because their job is being the best at this very specific thing they do. And they just came at it with that same attitude.”
‘It was like a Christmas miracle’
“A Philly Special Christmas Special” was released everywhere on Dec. 1 and is composed of the Eagles’ take on 10 holiday classics and an original tune by Kelce, “Santa’s Night.” A stop-motion animated film was released on Thanksgiving night and has already been viewed more than 550,000 times on YouTube, good enough to move it into the top 10 of the platform’s animated chart.
On TikTok and Instagram Reels, content using the songs across the ‘Philly Special,’ NFL and UGC accounts have racked up more than 185 million views. ‘The Fairytale of Philadelphia’ has been viewed more than 18 million times on social channels.
If the second album seems a bit more organized and promoted compared to the first – which came out on Dec. 23, 2022 – that’s because, well, it is.
“We were flying by the seat of our pants in terms of timeline,” Hall said of ‘A Philly Special Christmas.’ “They had this idea and we threw it together real quick and turned it around. And then through some real fortunate connections, we had records pressed in time for Christmas. It was like a Christmas miracle.”
The public responded, and the footballers-turned-musicians knew they had something special. Starting the process earlier in 2023 allowed them to make it bigger and better. Hall thinks they did so thanks to the players’ “magical” package of confidence and humility.
“Those guys are not afraid to take chances, and that’s a real skill,” Hall said.
The players aren’t skipping practice to sing scales with Hall in the studio, though. They recorded over a two-week period during the offseason.
“Those are memories I’ll remember forever, man, just these times,” Mailata told USA TODAY Sports.
And that has been most rewarding part of the venture for him.
“Corny as it is, man, spending time with these guys,” Mailata said, gesturing to Kelce and Johnson and the rest of the locker room. “Getting to know them outside of just being football players. They love music just as much as I love music. That’s been the best part aside from all the charity work, just hanging out with them. It’s truly special.
“We give up a lot to play on the field every Sunday, man. It’s nice to just know who you’re going to battle with. … We’re not going out there fighting in a war or anything, but that’s the truth, man. Just getting to know these guys on a deeper level, that’s been the best part. I’m the closest to these two then I’ve been in my six years (in the league).”
What’s next? ‘Find out next year’
The only people who knew about Kelce’s original were the man himself, Barwin and Hall. The group had finished their work for the day when they sprung the tune on the unsuspecting recording musicians in the studio.
What happened over the next hour or two, Hall said, “was really one of the most collaborative, creative things I’ve ever seen happen.”
Kelce had supplied them with a finished, “incredible” song. Hall and album mixer Nick Krill helped him shape it by setting the tune to the right chords and finding the “sweet kind of a world for that song to live in, sonically.”
“You feel like every Christmas sentiment has been said already, right? It almost seems like, what else is left to be expressed about Christmas?” Hall said. “And Jason wrote this song from Santa’s perspective about this dude that’s staring at this dreadful day of work that he’s got every year … and it was, like, the magic that happens. It was really a beautiful thing and it came from Jason’s creative mind.”
Kelce loves Christmas music, and it’s why he devoted the time and energy to be the ringleader of the project. Kelce is also one of those people whose empathy shines through in everything he does, Hall said.
“In a way,” Hall said, “it’s not surprising that he can write a classic Christmas song, too.
“Of course. What else can you do? Find out next year, I guess.”
This post appeared first on USA TODAY
