Sarah McLachlan's Atypical Christmas CD

Three-time Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan is out with her first-ever holiday album and first studio recording in three years, "Wintersong."

The singer-songwriter says she'd wanted to make a holiday album for a long time, "but the timing had to be right."

On The Early Show Tuesday, McLachlan told co-anchor Hannah Storm, "I had a good chunk of time off after I finished touring with my last record, and it seemed like the right time to get to it. I started doing the record in the springtime, which is an odd time to do a Christmas record, but that's actually when most people do it.

"It was fine. Everybody's like, 'Are you going to put Christmas trees up? But the songs are so beautiful and they've withstood the test of time for so many reasons, on so many levels. They're beautiful, beautiful songs, and it was really easy for me to get into singing them."

McLachlan says she has "a short list, definitely," of songs that she absolutely wanted to include — among them, Joni Mitchell's "River."

It's not a traditional Christmas song, and McLachlan says that was no accident: "I really wanted to create … (a) record (that wasn't) just a typical holiday record. I wanted to do something different and bring in songs that had elements of a lot of the things we feel around Christmas, (among them), that great sense of nostalgia.

"There's (also) a lot of sadness. I lost my mom a week before Christmas four years ago. So there's that contemplative, sort of bittersweet side to it as well that I think people do feel and, even though it's a happy time, it's a hard time for a lot of people, too. A lot of these songs that I chose reflect that, I think."

McLachlan makes no bones about her feeling that music "saved her life" when she was younger, "in so many ways. I was an insecure kid. I didn't have a lot of friends. I was picked on a lot, and I was very sensitive. Music was one of the only things I knew I was good at, and I had it and it was mine. It was like this dear friend that never let me down.

"I'm just so thankful I had that. It really kept me going. A lot of kids these days, there's no opportunity to learn music. And I think it's so imperative to have that kind of — to have that culture, to have that outlet in their lives."

"Wintersong" was a chart-topping holiday album the day McLachlan appeared on The Early Show.