Kathleen Edwards Braces for the Holidays in New Song ‘It’s Christmastime (Let’s Just Survive)’
Kathleen Edwards can’t believe it: The first original song she’s releasing since 2012 is full of “meows.” The song is “It’s Christmastime (Let’s Just Survive),” a highlight from the forthcoming holiday album A Dualtone Christmas that features artists like Amos Lee, the Lone Bellow, and Delta Spirit.
“We’re really going in with a bang,” Edwards says of the tongue-in-cheek ode to lovably disastrous holidays that features Edwards providing a cat-like refrain. “I’ve been working on my unison ‘meows’ this whole time.”
The song, which Edwards describes as “little fragments, with some fictionalized embellishments, of what Christmas is like at my house,” is full of rich, humorous details, from the Scrabbler sore loser to misguided John Mayer CD gift to the father who’s four martinis in (“my dad is the martini king,” Edwards says).
Edwards started writing “It’s Christmastime” during the 2018 holidays. “It’s that time of the year where you click the radio, and there’s the standard Christmas fare,” says the singer-songwriter. “I was like, ‘none of these are actually what Christmas is like. Christmas is a fucking zoo. It’s nuts and it’s not really that fun. It’s just chaos from start to finish. You spend too much. You fucking expect too much. Your parents, there’s always the drama of your dysfunctional fucking family. I was like, ‘How come there are no songs about that?'”
Much of the song draws from Edwards’ firsthand experiences with the holidays, including the verse where a family member gets upset about losing at Scrabble and a cat urinates on the Christmas tree. “I grew up in a family that was serious about Scrabble and there’s always one person who does not know how to enjoy losing,” she says. “Because, yeah, the reality is you might end up with a bunch of fucking vowels at the end. Suck it up. That’s Scrabble. And everyone who’s ever had a fucking cat knows that on Christmas, the tree is fair game, and it does usually get pissed on.”
A Dualtone Christmas is out December 6th.