Silent Night

Selah's recording keeps the familiar English verses of this hymn fully intact, then does something unusual for a carol this well-known: it inserts a verse in Kikongo, a language spoken in parts of Central Africa. "Yesu Klisto me kwisa, Klisto imene kwisa" — "Jesus Christ has come, Christ has already come" — sits in the middle of the English verses rather than replacing them.

The choice makes a quiet argument about the carol's reach: the same announcement that "Christ the Savior is born" gets made in more than one language within a single recording, treating the news as something that belongs to more places than the one it's usually sung in.

Luke's account of the angels announcing a Savior's birth, and Isaiah's promise of a coming child called Wonderful Counselor, both sit behind the carol regardless of which language is carrying them at a given moment. The final English verse, "Son of God, love's pure light... with the dawn of redeeming grace," closes the carol the same way it always has — just with one more language having said the same thing first.