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George Michael helped teach Holcombe Waller to sing. It was the mid-’80s, and Waller was a middle school student holed up in the family garage, producing pop songs with a six-track tape recorder and an Apple II computer. In elementary school, he'd fallen for Wham!, the English pop duo Michael fronted alongside Andrew Ridgeley. “I remember looking at posters of him and Andrew and their hair,” Waller says. “These pretty young men—they were not lovers, but they clearly loved each other.”

Then came Michael’s solo debut, Faith. Waller, a shy kid who knew from a young age that he was gay, was hooked. “I learned by emulating,” he says. “From the beginning, emulating his vocal style, as well as his layered vocal production, was the way I started making music.”

Waller, who's lived in Portland since 2005, went on to build a genre-bending career as a composer, singer, and performance artist. From early on, critics gushed over his dreamy, often mournful singing: "This 25-year-old loverboy's got the crazy-beautiful, four-octave voice of an androgynous seraph," wrote Kate Sullivan in Spin in 2001. ("Hardliners," an achingly gorgeous 2011 track, once sustained me in the throes of a breakup.) He's self-released five albums; organized queer, all-abilities community choirs for ceremonial requiems in Portland, San Francisco, and Sydney, Australia; and in 2017 put on a recital about the risks of transporting crude oil by rail along the Columbia River.

Michael, meanwhile, fell to the periphery in terms of inspiration, though he'd appear "on any nostalgic playlist,” Waller says. Then, sometime in 2018 or 2019, local producer Howie Bierbaum approached Waller: It was time, Bierbaum said, for Waller to start thinking about a holiday show. And Bierbaum (also behind Storm Large’s long-running Holiday Ordeal variety show), knowing nothing of Waller’s adolescent connection to the pop idol, who died on Christmas Day in 2016, thought he would do George Michael very well.

This weekend, A Very George Michael Christmas finally lands at the Alberta Rose Theatre (7 and 9:30pm Saturday, December 20; $55–65). The show features 15 songs, a band christened the Careless Whispers, and several backup and guest vocalists. It also represents a return to the spotlight for Waller, who in 2021 bought the century-old Klondike Hotel in St. Helens and has been occupied with its restoration since.

“Last Christmas,” of course, is on the bill; it’s the second-most-streamed holiday song ever on Spotify, behind Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” So are the inescapable “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” (“It’s cold out there but it’s warm in bed”) and the yearning “Father Figure,” plus a variety of deeper cuts. Aesthetically, Waller promises "the leather and fashion vibes" of Faith (the concert's promo art gloriously recreates that album cover), the ’80s pastel brights of Wham!, and "a layer of Christmassy Las Vegas sparkle" (though perhaps not the chunky sweaters of the iconic “Last Christmas” video). And? “Yeah, there may be snow,” he says. “I can’t guarantee it, because it’s a technical feat. But there’s a chance of snow.”

More things to do this week

Elsewhere...

• A new six-day, multivenue music festival called Soundscape Northwest comes to the Central Eastside this spring. (Willamette Week)
• "I noticed the firmness and thick, resilient quality of the pillows and mattresses": Lindsay Costello on Pipilotti Rist’s installation at the Portland Art Museum. (Portland Mercury)