Category: Lifestyle

(Move Over, Purple People Eater)

Let me start the whole month with the thought that made me write this album in the first place.

Think about the songs that come on every single October. Monster Mash, which came out in 1962. The Purple People Eater, 1958. Add a couple of movie hits from the 1980s, a Disney parade tune, and maybe one spell-casting classic, and you have basically the entire Halloween playlist that most families reach for year after year. I love those songs. I grew up on them. But here is the strange part. We have been playing the same handful of records for more than sixty years.

Now compare that to Christmas. Every year brings a fresh crop of new Christmas songs, new arrangements, new voices, whole new albums. Christmas music is a living, growing thing. Halloween music mostly stopped growing around the time your grandparents were kids. Somewhere along the way we decided Halloween only gets novelty songs, one per generation, and then we just keep them on a loop.

I do not think that is good enough. Kids today deserve Halloween music made for them, right now, the way they get fresh everything else. So I made a whole album of it. Nineteen brand new original songs, built for the whole family, that treat Halloween as seriously and as joyfully as we treat Christmas. That is what Midnight Masquerade is. Move over, Purple People Eater. There is room at the party for something new.

And this is not a pile of one-off novelty tracks. It is a real album with a real shape, a single night that gets stranger the longer it goes on, told in four acts.

Act one is Dusk on the Street. The sun is still up. Kids carve pumpkins, fill pillowcases, and a headless horseman rides by who only wants your candy. Bright, silly, and built for the youngest listeners.

Act two is The Crowd Gathers. We head indoors and the creatures arrive. A haunted carnival, a witches waltz, a potion that goes very wrong. The whimsy stays, but the shadows are getting longer.

Act three is The Ball. The masquerade itself, the heart of the record. A skeleton takes the floor, the title track brings the whole company in, and something at the party is hunting.

Act four is After Midnight. The party pours back out onto the street. The neighbors take over, the sun comes up, and a dad in a costume t-shirt closes the whole thing out.

You can put it on start to finish and feel the night turn. That is the difference between a novelty single and an album you can live inside. All month I am walking you through it, one song a day. Come back tomorrow for the very first track.

Follow me so you never miss a new song or album. When you follow me on your streaming platform, every new release lands in your library the moment it drops:

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Amazon Music
• Deezer
• Pandora

Join my email list so you hear each new release first.

Come say hi: Instagram | YouTube | Facebook

SEO Tags: Melanie Grace, TheMelanieGrace, independent artist, Song Writer, Midnight Masquerade, fresh Halloween music, new Halloween songs, move over Purple People Eater, Monster Mash alternative, family Halloween album, concept album, four acts, original Halloween music 2026

---

While you are here, pre-save my upcoming album A Folklore Christmas on Spotify.

Why Pre-Saving an Ablum Means the World (And How It Helps You!)

If you’ve ever wondered why artists are always asking you to pre-save their upcoming albums on Spotify, here’s the secret: it’s the single best way to make sure you don’t miss a beat, while giving independent music a massive boost!

Here is what pre-saving actually does for you—and for the album:

• It drops right into your library on launch day: The moment A Christmas Folklore goes live, Spotify will automatically add it straight to your Liked Songs and library. You won’t have to search for it, set a reminder, or worry about missing release day.
• It feeds the Spotify algorithm: Algorithms pay close attention to pre-save numbers. A high pre-save count signals to Spotify that people are excited about the record, which helps push our spooky tracks onto official curated playlists, radio feeds, and recommendation charts for brand new listeners.
• It helps independent music thrive: Every single pre-save gives independent artists a louder voice on major streaming platforms, helping us share these fun, family-friendly Halloween tunes far and wide.

It only takes one click, but it makes a huge difference!

There are no lyrics in the chapters.

That was a decision, and it was not the original plan, and I want to explain it because the shape of the book depends on it.

A Folklore Christmas started as an album. Twenty-four songs, one for nearly every creature, written over about two years. The book came second. It came because I kept finishing a song and realizing I had learned six things while writing it that would not fit inside three minutes, and it seemed a waste to throw them out.

So the first draft of the book did the obvious thing. Each chapter ended with its song. Krampus chapter, Krampus lyric. Grýla chapter, Grýla lyric. It felt natural. It felt like a companion piece doing its job.

It did not work, and the reason it did not work is worth saying out loud.

A song and a source note are two different kinds of claim, and if you put them on facing pages, the reader stops being able to tell which is which.

Here is the problem in miniature. The chapter on Frau Perchta tells you that church officials in Bavaria condemned the cult of Fraw Percht in 1468, and that Thomas Ebendorfer condemned the same practice in Vienna in 1439. Those are facts. They have citations. You can go check them, and I want you to.

The song about Frau Perchta tells you what it is like to hear her at the door.

The second thing is not a lesser thing. But it is not evidence, and I was putting it four inches away from the evidence, in the same typeface, under the same chapter heading, and the effect was that the whole chapter got softer. The song leaked into the history and made it feel like decoration. The history leaked into the song and made it feel like homework. Both got worse.

Pre-Save the Album today!

Worse than that, I noticed it was doing something dishonest. A reader who finished the Mari Lwyd chapter and immediately read a Mari Lwyd lyric would come away with an impression of ancient Celtic horse veneration that the actual documentary record does not support, and the lyric would have done that work, not the prose, and I would not have had to write a single false sentence to accomplish it. That is exactly the kind of thing this book exists to argue against. I was not going to do it by accident in my own margins.

So I pulled all twenty-four out and put them at the back, together, as a Songbook.

What happened next surprised me. The chapters got harder and cleaner. Without a song waiting at the end to supply the feeling, each chapter had to earn its own weight out of the material, and several of them turned out to be carrying less than I thought. Those got rewritten. The book is better because the songs left.

And the songs got better too, or at least they got seen better. Read together, in order, at the back, they stop being twenty-four separate illustrations and become a thing with a shape: an album, which is what they always were. The Songbook opens with the warning and closes at Epiphany, and the arc that runs through it is not the same arc the chapters run. It is allowed to be its own argument now.

Each lyric in the Songbook carries a line telling you which creature it belongs to, so you can go back if you want. Most people, I suspect, will not go back. They will read the chapters straight through and then read the Songbook straight through and let the two versions sit next to each other without resolving, which is the correct way to do it and which I could not have designed if I had tried.

One of them, the twelfth, ends in the middle of a sentence, on an open quotation mark. That is not a typo. It has been flagged as a typo by three different people so far. I am leaving it.

The Songbook runs at the back of every edition, print and Kindle both. The Kindle is out now; hardcover and paperback land October 1. The album follows on November 1, which is when the Songbook stops being a text and starts being what it is.

Pre-Save the Album today!

The reindeer kept coming back.

I was generating the cover art, and every pass, the machine would slip a reindeer onto the rim. I would take it out, describe what I wanted again, and the next version would hand it back to me, a little larger, antlers up, standing there among the monsters like it had been invited.

I understood why. A reindeer is what the tool thinks Christmas is. Feed a machine every Christmas image ever made and ask it for a Christmas picture, and it will reach for the softest thing in the pile, because the soft version is the one that got printed ten million times. The reindeer is Santa’s animal. It is the sleigh, the snow, the wholesome part. And this is a book about everything the wholesome part was built to cover.

So the reindeer had to go, over and over, and getting it to stay gone turned out to be most of the work.

Here is what the cover is, so the rest makes sense. It is a medallion, a disc, and around its rim walks the whole company: Krampus with the basket of children on his back and his tongue out, the Yule Cat black and enormous, Grýla at her cooking pot, La Befana on her broom with her sack, the Tomte holding his bowl of porridge, the Mari Lwyd’s beribboned skull, the Gävle Goat made of straw and already on fire, the goblins clustered and grinning, a woman with a key, a woman with a knife. They face inward. They ring the disc like figures on a clock, or on a plate, or on a shield.

And the center, the thing they all surround, is empty. It is a still winter forest under a full moon. No creature in it. Just snow, and black trees, and the light coming back.

That is the argument of the entire book in one image, and I did not plan it that cleanly. It arrived while I was trying to fix the reindeer. The monsters are the rim. They are not the point. They are what stands around the quiet center and keeps watch over it. Take them away and you do not get more of the peaceful middle. You get a plate with nothing holding its edge.

The passes were mostly about who belonged on the rim and how much menace the disc could hold before it tipped into a Halloween prop.

Pre-Save the Album today!

One version came back on cream parchment, bright, in the style of an old illuminated manuscript, and it added a jester in bells and a mounted rider blowing a horn. It was, objectively, a nice picture. It was also busy and a little jolly, and jolly is the exact failure I was trying to avoid. Menace does not come from crowding the frame. It comes from restraint, from a few figures on a dark ground, given room. That version went in the bin.

The black ground won. On black, the gold rim reads like something dug up rather than something printed, and the figures stop being cute and start being present. That is the difference between a monster you laugh at and a monster you would not want at your door, and it is almost entirely a lighting decision.

Somewhere in the middle of all this the reindeer finally lost its spot, and what took its place was the Yule Cat. I want to note that swap because it is the whole book in one substitution. The reindeer is the animal that brings you gifts. The Yule Cat is the animal that eats you if your family did not finish the wool work. Same corner of the same disc. One is the Christmas we kept. The other is the Christmas we threw out. Putting the Cat where the reindeer wanted to be is not subtle, and I do not care.

The final disc got cropped into its circle by hand, in Canva, because the clean edge mattered and I was not going to leave it to chance. Then it went onto a deep red board, and the red is doing a specific job. Black cover, black medallion, and the thing looks like a horror novel. Red underneath, and it looks like Christmas that has something wrong with it, which is correct. The disc is dark. The book around it is a holiday. You are meant to feel the tension between those two things before you have read a word.

The back says “Before Santa, there were the others,” and then names a few of them, and ends with “Ye be warned,” which is also the first song on the album. The whole object is trying to tell you, at a glance, that this is Christmas with its teeth still in.

The reindeer never made it. I checked the final file three times to be sure.

The hardcover and paperback land October 1, and the medallion is worth seeing at full size. Until then, the Kindle carries the same cover, smaller, and is available now.