Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	73/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
ABC News
The Boston Globe	(favorable)
Country Weekly
The Guardian
HitFix	A
Newsday	A-
NPR	(favorable)
Slant Magazine

Echo Studio, EastWest Studios
(Los Angeles, California)

Wrapped in Red is the sixth studio album by American recording artist Kelly Clarkson, released on October 25, 2013, by RCA Records. The album is a follow-up to her first greatest hits album, Greatest Hits – Chapter One, and its companion extended play, The Smoakstack Sessions Vol. 2. Produced by Greg Kurstin, it is her first Christmas album and her first record to be solely released by RCA. Wrapped in Red consists of sixteen tracks, featuring five co-penned original songs and eleven cover versions of Christmas standards and carols, two of which are duets featuring recording artists Ronnie Dunn, Reba McEntire and Trisha Yearwood.

Weary of constantly being asked for her primary genre, Clarkson had long-desired to record a Christmas album as a means to defy genre limitations. She commissioned Kurstin, who had studied jazz music under the tutelage of Jaki Byard, to produce the entire album. Drawing inspirations from the soundtracks to the features A Charlie Brown Christmas and White Christmas, as well as the Christmas albums by Mariah Carey, McEntire, and Phil Spector, they experimented on various styles and sounds using Spector's famed Wall of Sound technique to a create a contemporary holiday theme to classics. The Christmas music of Wrapped in Red comprises a variety of genres such as pop, jazz, country, and soul, marking a departure from the pop rock sound established from Clarkson's previous studio albums, while its lyrics share a singular theme of the color red, which represents a plethora of emotions during the holidays.

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