Why Odom Jr. is doing his first-ever holiday music tour

As a Broadway actor, Leslie Odom Jr. is familiar with the extra effort required as the winter holidays ramp up.

“There’s something about it that feels like service,” Odom says on a recent call to talk about The Christmas Tour. “Those of us that come from the theater, around Thanksgiving and Christmas in New York City, we’re like theme park performers, you know what I mean?

“We do more shows,” he says. “More days that you’re working, not less. And you kind of know that you are part of the attraction to the city at that time of the year.”

A year ago, Odom did his holiday service in the Broadway revival of “Purlie Victorious,” for which he was nominated for best actor in a play and, as producer, best revival of a play. A few years before, his Tony Award-winning run as Aaron Burr in the original off-Broadway and Broadway productions of “Hamilton,” spanned the holidays in 2015 and 2016.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Odom talked about missing part of the holidays with his family, becoming known as a performer of Christmas music, and more.

What will this Christmas tour away from your wife (actress Nicolette Robinson) and children during the holidays be like?

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s going to be tricky. It’s sort of a sacrifice, but we’ve been talking about this tour for years. You know, the first Christmas album was really a fan-prompted thing. All my other albums, I went into the studio and made, and then brought them back to people and hoped that people would be interested. But the very first Christmas album was something that I went to my manager, and I said, ‘People keep saying to me on Twitter, ‘You should make a Christmas album, your voice is perfect for Christmas albums,’ you know. It was something that I really heard so much that I was like, ‘Should we explore this?

So tell me about growing up in Philadelphia, and your early Christmas music memories as a boy.

I guess the one that has stayed with me the longest, besides, of course, the Bing Crosby and the Nat King Cole – those songs have been part of Americana for years — is the Boyz II Men album (“Christmas Interpretations”). They were Philadelphians like I was. They went to the same high school that I went to. Not at the same time. That album meant a lot to us as kids.

I think there is something they did with that album that I hoped I could do with mine. They made something classic, both modern and classic. It sounded true to them and their sound, but it also is wonderfully undated. Maybe not totally undated, and it’s not music that sounds like it could have come from the ’50s, right? It came out in the ’90s and it still sounds good to me today.

So anyway, when we went in to record the very first album, and the second one too, we hoped that we could make music that would sound good today and forevermore.

Your first album was all Christmas standards, but there are also some newer songs, non-standards on the second one, like ‘Winter Song,’ the one Cynthia Erivo sings on that was written by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson. How did you pick the songs?

We really go all out in the studio. We’re usually recording those songs in July, so we decorate the studio, where we put ourselves in the Christmas mood. We try to make music that touches us, that means something to us. Music that sounds and feels good to us, and then we trust and hope that it will sound and feel good to other people, too. So it starts from a really personal place.

The first album, ‘Simply Christmas,’ we love that record and our budget was so small. So part of the simplicity of ‘Simply Christmas’ was a lack of a lot of dough [laughs]. We tried to make something elegant with the sort of limited resources that we had. We went for elegance and we went for sincerity. We couldn’t dress it up very much.