Tom Petty sets the standard with the opening track, Christmas all over again. Darlene Love, one of the stars of the Phil Spector Christmas album, reminds us all how Christmas rock music really began, here to be heard singing a cover of Rocking around the Christmas tree. Bonnie Raitt and Charles Brown bring a touch of the blues to the collection with their rendition of Merry Christmas baby. Santa Claus is coming to town features Cyndi Lauper and Frank Sinatra, though this is not a true duet - Cyndi's vocals were overdubbed on Frank's original recording. Jon Bon Jovi does an excellent cover of the Eagles classic Please come home for Christmas.

There are so many superb songs here, brilliantly performed. It may not be possible to like every track, but if you enjoy most of them (I enjoyed almost all of them), their quality will more than make up for the others.


Only a Few Shining Gems   December 8, 2002
D. Movahedpour (CA United States)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful

There are very few songs on this second collection in the "Very Special Christmas Series" that I consider memorable. I love the opening song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Christmas All Over Again" which is a very upbeat, original song and a great lead off. Most of the other songs do not follow suit, however. The only stand-outs to me were Luther Vandross' jazzy version of the traditional "Christmas Song" and the fun "Rockin Around the Christmas Tree" by Darlene Love. My favorite on the album is the original "Christmas Time Again" by the long-defunct 90's band, Extreme, and Tevin Campbell's heart felt version of "Oh Holy Night." I found myself skipping over most of the other songs, and we won't even go near Michael Bolton's travesty of "White Christmas." Thank goodness for CD's and the "skip" feature.


Yule Get Your Money's Worth   November 26, 2003
Ken Cook (Chelmsford, MA USA)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful

The second volume of "A Very Special Christmas", released in 1992, is crammed with 19 tracks, though at least three of them should have been left on the shelf which is why this set gets four stars instead of five. Still, I highly recommend this album which is a worthy successor to Volume 1 (to which I gave five stars). Of the 19 tracks, 5 are timeless "gems", 3 are simply horrible and the other 11 range from "OK" to pretty darn good.

Lead-off track is the first gem of this set, the Tom Petty song "Christmas All Over Again" which you have probably heard on the radio a thousand times by now. Still, I'm not tired of it and look forward to hearing it "all over again" each Christmas. Next is a version of "Jingle Bell Rock" by Randy Travis with a false ending. I'm sort of tired of this song but this version of it is pretty good. This is followed by Luther Vandross' version of "The Christmas Song," another song I'm tired of but this particular version is soulful and smooth. Not bad at all.

I'm not too crazy about the pairing of Frank Sinatra with the awful Cyndi Lauper ("Santa Claus Is Coming To Town") but they somehow make it work. Boyz II Men was a very annoying band back in the late 1980s/early 1990s but their "Birth Of Christ" is not a bad effort at all. I like it well enough. Then Jon Bon Jovi sort of mails in "Please Come Home For Christmas" - yet another Christmas song that is getting overrecorded. Not a clunker but nothing special either.

Here, the album picks up for a while. Paul Young's "What Christmas Means To Me" is a sprightly tune that still gets plenty of airtime during Christmas. Next is the second gem on this compilation, Aretha Franklin's very moving and soulful take of "O Christmas Tree", practically turning it into a gospel song in the process. This is first rate stuff. Next up is Ronnie Spector and the ubiquitous Darlene Love doing a rollicking version of "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree."

At this point, the album takes a horrible turn with Michael Bolton's butchering of "White Christmas." Do you remember the old SNL skit of John Belushi doing a Joe Cocker imitation? Well this is sort of like a SNL parody of Michael Bolton only it's Michael Bolton for real! Scary stuff. Next is Run-DMC with "Christmas Is" and it just doesn't have the magic of their "Christmas In Hollis" from Volume 1. They should have left this one in the can. It's jarring and just doesn't put you in the holiday spirit at all. The only thing going for it is that it follows a Michael Bolton song. Finally the album is back on track with Extreme (a defunct 1980s band) doing "Christmas Time Again", a song that they wrote. And it's pretty darn good.

Now we get into some blues with Bonnie Raitt and Charles Brown doing the classic "Merry Christmas Baby" and they do a good job with it. Next up is the third gem which is Tevin Campbell's "O Holy Night" which I never get tired of hearing each and every year. Then we come to our third "clunker" which is the simply horrid Debbie Gibson doing an uninspiring and lame version of a song that is lame to begin with ("Sleigh Ride"). It's a good thing she never married Michael Bolton or the government would have had to step in to keep them from having kids.

But the album is rescued once again with the fourth gem, a jazzy version of "What Child Is This" that just never gets tired no matter how many times you hear it. The next two tracks are just "okay." Ann & Nancy Wilson (nucleus of "Heart") doing a perfunctory version of "Blue Christmas" and Wilson Phillips (remember them?) doing a version of "Silent Night." Not bad but not memorable either.

Finally the album closes out with the fifth and final "gem." This would be Sinead O'Connor's "I Believe In You." Not technically a Christmas song (it was penned by Bob Dylan) but it definitely has that Christmas feel to it. Say what you want about Sinead O'Connor but she really knows how to carry a tune.
What a voice.


I want a Rickenbacker guitar   December 9, 2004
Johnny Heering (Bethel, CT United States)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

This album is good, but it isn't quite the classic that the first Very Special Christmas is. The highlight is definitely the opening song by Tom Petty. The rest of the album is somewhat uneven. While there are some fine performances by the likes of Sinead O'Conner, Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love, there are also a few lame performances by people like Jon Bon Jovi, Michael Bolton and Extreme. One of the oddities here is a "duet" between Frank Sinatra and Cyndi Lauper. They actually just used an old vocal by Frank from 1947 and added Cyndi's voice to it. In an interesting side note, they originally tried to have Paula Adbul do the duet, but she was unable to hit the right notes. The only artist here that is repeated from the the first Very Special Christmas is Run-D.M.C., but the song they do here is far inferior to the classic "Christmas in Hollis". Overall it's a decent Christmas album, and if you are a fan of the performers featured on it, I would recommend it.