Tkay Maidza shares new holiday song ‘Nights in December’
It’s officially the Christmas season! The holiday gods have officially renounced American Thanksgiving and have moved right on to the yuletide season. Well, maybe not the holiday gods, but certainly the music gods have moved on. November is prime time to get in a Christmas carol before Mariah Carey swoops in and ruins it for everyone.
Plenty of artists are getting the jump on the Xmas trends this year. In fact, Baltimore’s own Future Islands set the pace just a few weeks back with their cover of Wham!’s eternal heartbreak jam ‘Last Christmas’. Now, Australian singer-songwriter Tkay Maidza is throwing her Santa hat in the Christmas ring with a brand new winter-themed song, ‘Nights in December’.
An ode to New York City during the holiday season, ‘Nights in December’ is an original track that looks to shed some new light on the traditional holiday song formula. Not Xmas-specific, but rather winter-themed, ‘Nights in December’ unfurls with some buzzy synths and light R&B rhythm. As always, it’s Maidza’s voice that sticks out from the track.
“I thought it would be cool to make a song that captures the feeling of a new relationship but using wintertime in New York as the inspiration,” Maidza explains in a statement. “I had a trip where I spent a winter in New York, and it was really beautiful so I almost wanted to recreate that feeling in a song.”
As someone who has grown incredibly tired of the traditional canon of holiday songs (and someone who will fully admit to enjoying Sia’s album of original Xmas material, Everyday Is Christmas), I’m a big proponent of artists writing their own holiday songs instead of just going with a cover that everyone knows. Maidza doesn’t try to rewrite a classic here, and in fact, if you weren’t paying close enough attention, you could barely tell that it’s a holiday song at all. That makes it a great holiday song, since all the traditional ones just seem like weeks-old ham now.
Check out the audio for ‘Nights in December’ down below.
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