Revisit the serene Christmas song by Julia Jacklin
When Julia Jacklin dropped her third album Pre Pleasure back in August, it reaffirmed her status as one of her generation’s finest musicians. Possessing a dreamlike form of vocal delivery and a propensity to write songs that both rouse and pull at the heartstrings, there’s a lot to love about Jacklin.
Musically, it appears that there’s nothing Jacklin is afraid of getting stuck into, as she demonstrated in December 2020 when she delivered her first Christmas track, ‘Baby Jesus Is Nobody’s Baby Now’. A maudlin piece that inverts the trope of the joyful Christmas number, it’s one of the more refreshing Yuletide efforts out there, which is ironic given just how blue the overall feel is.
At the inception, the Australian musician describes a woman losing a baby after the house burns down, setting a precedent for all to come. The highlight comes just after halfway when she sings in her siren-like falsetto, “Watch me go to bed alone this year / there was somebody I wanted but they’re no longer here”. It is heartbreaking.
The melancholy spirit of the song was inspired by how Jacklin was feeling at the time, inspired by her guilt for constantly touring and not being at home when her family were experiencing the deadly bushfires at the end of 2019.
“2019 was a pretty rough one for my family,” she explained. “I was touring the whole year carrying a lot of guilt for not being able to be at home. Singing super sad songs every night was a blessing and a curse depending on the day. I was imagining Christmas as being this time where we all came together again and took a collective breath, but then the bushfires hit, and my family live in the country, so it was a direct threat.”
“I was living in Melbourne, still pretty new to it, and wasn’t able to go home; the roads were blocked, and my family was being evacuated periodically for a month,” she continued. “At one point, Melbourne was blanketed in smoke from the fires, the sun was this menacing red, it felt apocalyptic and pretty hopeless. I wrote this in my room looking forward to 2020, hoping it would be a reset of some kind.”
Check out the song below.
