Brandi Carlile’s favourite Christmas song: “Aching beauty and heartbreak”
Despite what anyone says, revealing your favourite Christmas song says more about you than you realise.
Every year, when the festive season rolls around once more, it seems to be one of the more unavoidable topics of conversation, or a question that holds far more weight than it actually should, given the spirit of the time of year, “What’s your favourite Christmas song?”, and for some reason, as you get older, the answer seems to change more often than it used to.
It’s almost like those knee-jerk responses that say more about how you actually feel than when you’ve given it more thought, but when someone asks you what your favourite Christmas song is, the true answer is usually the one that immediately pops into your head the second your brain kicks into gear, and then, when you’ve started to challenge yourself with other potential forerunners, that’s when it becomes a game of roulette before you revert to the first one you thought of.
And if that’s not the case, it’s either because you’ve realised that there are a handful of classics that are hard to pick from, or that choosing the best of a bad bunch is impossible when there are so many non-festive masterpieces out there to fill your time with instead. Whichever way you sit, most of us almost always come back to the usual suspects.
For example, it’s hard to place anything above Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ or The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’. Even Band Aid’s original 1984 classic ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ has that familiar, festive-time infectious charm that’s hard not to sing along to, while some of the more nostalgic heart-warmers, like Nat King Cole’s ‘The Christmas Song’ and Judy Garland’s ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, can often place you somewhere comforting and intimate in a way that non-festive tunes never will.
On the other hand, some of the better Christmas songs are those that aren’t so overt about being a Christmas song, instead opting for subtle imagery, associations with the time of year, and other familiar festive themes like unity, love, and hope. Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’, for instance, became an honorary Christmas classic purely because it offered a different perspective, helping the lonelier and more grief-ridden people feel a bit less isolated come Christmas time.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons why it became Brandi Carlile’s favourite Christmas song – because it opened her eyes to different people’s experiences around the festive season. That, plus the fact that it’s a beautiful song, was the reason why it stayed with her more than any other.
“There’s something about ‘River’ that perfectly encapsulates the aching beauty and heartbreak of the season,” Carlile told Vulture.
“Hearing it was the first time, I realised how some people might look at the season from a very different, less joyful perspective,” she went on.
Adding, “The holidays can bring a lot of people pain, and I think that we look to these kinds of heartbreak songs during that time because it’s really important to represent, or to be represented, if that holiday brings back hard memories, or if you have lost someone that you think about in a concentrated way during that time.”
Perhaps that’s why tastes change as you get older – especially when it comes to Christmas tunes. When you’re younger, you’re more likely to appreciate the fun or joyful tunes, the ones that are simple enough and catchy enough to stay with you each time the season rolls around, but as time goes on, however, and you’re more well-versed in the ache of loss, heartache, resilience, and hope, you begin to gravitate toward the songs that make you feel comforted, like ‘River’, knowing that you’re not quite alone as you might feel.
