When Josh Turner was working on his first-ever Christmas album, King Size Manger, he and his producer Kenny Greenburg were going back and forth on certain standards they wanted to put on the album. One classic Kenny suggested was “Silent Night,” but it wasn’t one of Josh’s first choices. It was on a father-son trip with his youngest son where the ideas for the arrangement of the song started flooding the singer’s brain.

“I just had gone to South Carolina to my cabin with my youngest, Hawke. Because I’ve taken all of my boys on a father-son trip to our cabin, at a certain point, but Hawke was a lot older than the other three were when I finally got to take him because life’s been so crazy lately,” says Josh. “And so, I had taken him, and we were there one night, and he had already gone to bed, I had gone to bed, but all of a sudden, this idea popped in my head of the ‘Silent Night’ and the string arrangement and all that. So, I got up and got my guitar out and, and just started playing it, you know, to my phone, and the ideas kept flowing, of how to, you know, make it impactful. And then we eventually had Stuart Duncan come in and play a fiddle part on top of that with like, kind of a two-string Appalachian kind of vibe. It turned out to be a pretty cool thing with all that combined and it’s you know, it’s like a five-minute version, but you kind of get wrapped up in the song and what it’s all about.”

Josh is taking his Holiday & The Hits Tour to Mount Vernon, Kentucky on Thursday (December 9th).