December is just a few days away, which means it’s time once again for Christmas music to be everywhere all the time. If you’re looking for something different than “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (the timeless Mariah Carey hit just returned to the charts as it does every year, by the way), Phoebe Bridgers has something for you.
She just shared a cover of McCarthy Trenching’s 2008 track “Christmas Song,” which is about how the holidays can be a lonely time for some folks. She performs the song on keyboard, and her gentle singing really brings out the sadness of the song. If you happen to recognize the backing vocals, that’s because they’re sung by Jackson Browne.
Bridgers explains how this collaboration came to be and says of the song:
McCarthy Trenching is singer-songwriter Dan McCarthy’s band. We played a show together in Omaha this last year. They named the band after the trenching company owned by Dan’s uncle so they could sell those t-shirts instead of having to make their own. The first time I heard this song it hit me like a ton of bricks. A lot of McCarthy Trenching songs do that. I played a show in LA around the holidays last year where I covered it for the first time. Jackson Browne was there, and he came up to me after the show to tell me how much he loved the song. A couple days later, Dan got a Bandcamp notification on his desktop computer that someone paid 50 bucks for his record and wrote a nice note and signed it Jackson Browne. He thought someone was f*cking with him. So when I decided to record a version of the song, I knew who I wanted to sing on it. Plus, I have wanted to make music with Jackson as long as I’ve wanted to make music.”
Listen to “Christmas Song” above, and read our interview with Bridgers here.
