Clay Aiken 'Left Music' 10 Years Ago. How Recording a New Christmas Album 'Opened' His 'Eyes' Again (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Clay Aiken.Photo:Curtis Brown Photography

Curtis Brown Photography

After more than a decade away from music,Clay Aikenis back with a gift for fans this holiday season.

On Nov. 22, theAmerican Idolalum marked his return to music with a holiday album titledChristmas Bells Are Ringing. Speaking with PEOPLE about the album, Aiken opens up about how his passion for music was reignited.

When Ruben Studdard — hisIdolseason 2 co-star — reached out about doing something to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Aiken’sMerry Christmas with Love, they decided to go on tour — and had “so much fun with it.”

“It was eye-opening to me to be able to come back on the road and enjoy it in ways that I had not realized I would enjoy it,” Aiken, 46, tells PEOPLE exclusively of his experience after he “left music.”

By the end of the 82-date tour, Aiken thought to himself, “I’d like to go back out and do this again at some point. And I realized in order to do that, that I probably needed to do something new for the first time, and I needed to record some new material.”

Clay Aiken.Curtis Brown Photography

When he really thought about it, his festive string of Joyful Noise shows from 2004-2007 was his favorite “tour to do,” andMerry Christmas with Loveis his favorite “album in general.”

“Also, I’ve been doing stuff that’s not necessarily joyful for the last 10, 15 years. And so if I wanted to come back, I wanted to do something that just made people happy and Christmas makes everybody happy,” says Aiken, who ran for Congress twice and became a UNICEF Ambassador on his musical hiatus.

Christmas Bells Are Ringing Cover Art.Clay Aiken

Clay Aiken

“I really wanted to do songs that people know Christmas is about. I mean, it is about nostalgia. It’s that time of year at the end of the year where we look back on the year that we’ve had and reflect, and we also like those memories from years past,” he says.

“I wanted classic Christmas songs. I also wanted to hearken back to that Andy Williams, Perry Como vibe of those Christmas albums from the sixties and seventies that have become American standards,” he continues. “So I picked songs that specifically lent themselves either to that style or to being able to be produced in that style because the whole idea for this album is to try to recreate that 1960s, ’70s Christmas classic.”

Reflecting on his time away from music, Aiken says the break was “eye-opening, educational [and] heartbreaking.”

“I hope I’ve gotten a better sense of real America. I say heartbreaking, mostly because of the way that our political system operates now. It’s not likeTheWest Wing, which is what I hoped it would be,” he says. “It’s not, people aren’t always in it for themselves, but I have gotten a beautiful sense of non-political American people, people who are working every day to feed their kids and put clothes on their backs and whatnot, which is the vast majority of us.”

On a personal level, he believes the experience made him resilient and opened his eyes to the power of music.

“Coming back to it, I see that there’s a way that music and entertainment can make people happy and give people an opportunity to escape from their problems in ways that the other stuff that I was working on would never be able to do,” he says.

Aiken concludes, “It opened my eyes to the power that music can bring to improving people’s lives in ways that I never saw before I stepped away from it.”

Christmas Bells Are Ringingis out now.

source: people.com