If you’re leaning into your melancholy side this holiday season, look no further than Kacey Musgraves‘ “Christmas Makes Me Cry.” This gem off of the singer’s 2016 album, A Very Kacey Christmas, cuts through the festive air to offer a dose of realism. Musgraves knows that the holiday season isn’t all ribbons and bows, so she teamed up with Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark to write a song about it. The result is “Christmas Makes Me Cry,” a somber tune that touches on themes of loneliness, broken hearts, and other feelings that are oft-neglected in popular holiday songs.
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In a behind-the-scenes video about the track, the Grammy winner explains how there are many “different facets” of Christmas, including the “whimsical, childhood” side that’s captured in the spirit of such songs as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “The Chipmunk Song,” and “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” which are also featured on A Very Kacey Christmas. But she also acknowledges the “melancholy, sadder side of Christmas” with the original tune, “Christmas Makes Me Cry” which taps into the “Unspoken, sometimes melancholy heaviness that we go through when we think about people who were here with us and maybe aren’t now,” Musgraves explains. “We see our parents getting older and the passage of time and nostalgia, it can be a sad subject for me.”
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Revealing that she “bawled” when they wrote it and that it was challenging for her to sing without getting emotional, the singer says that the song made her think of being away from her family. “I’m away from my family a lot and Christmas is a time to reunite and see people that you haven’t seen all year long and you realize that there’s a lot of distance in the ins and outs of every day that you don’t see each other,” she observes. “For me, tapping into the sad side of Christmas was weirdly, ironically fun.”
Musgraves also notes how that sense of sadness can linger after the holidays. “Think about it. The day after Christmas is one of the saddest days of the year. All the paper is on the floor, your family is going home. It’s kind of like this big moment has dropped and then it’s just cold winter until New Year’s,” she described to Taste of Country Nights. “I definitely wanted to include all emotions, not just the happy ones.”
Willie Nelson, Leon Bridges, and swing band The Quebe Sisters also guest star on A Very Kacey Christmas, which reached No. 9 on the Billboard Top Holiday Albums chart, No. 11 on the Top Country Albums chart, and No. 21 on the all-genre Billboard 200.
Photo by Rick Diamond/Getty Images
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