Along with all the joy, togetherness and rampant commercialism, the holiday season can be a fraught time, too. Though it’s a myth that suicides rise around Christmas, it’s definitely true that going home for the holidays can unpack all kinds of baggage that the airlines won’t even charge extra to carry. Creaky family dynamics can totter and sway, while catching up with old friends, or running into old exes, can ignite a complicated mix of feelings.
That’s what Elizabeth Moen is getting at on “You Know I Know,” a pulsing rocker from her new album “Wherever You Aren’t.” Moen’s narrator is back home, making plans with the old gang while weighing how she feels about a former lover. Her string of verses toggle between an idealized vision and the piercing reality of loving someone who apparently can’t get their shit together. “Glad you’re better since everything last spring,” she sings at one point. “But I don’t know if calling me / Is really what you need.” The song needn’t be a holiday tune, though the sleigh bells that ring out over thrumming bass after the first chorus pretty much set the scene.
Phoebe Bridgers turns up the dial from fraught to harrowing on her new holiday cover, a version of the Handsome Family’s “So Much Wine” that features Andrew Bird. It’s a Christmas song inasmuch as it mentions Christmas Day, but otherwise it’s a bleak elegy for a life undercut by addiction — far bleaker than the Handsome Family’s original, which at least has jangly guitar and a country twang. “There's only so much wine / That you can drink in one life,” Bridgers sings on the chorus, in a somber, dusky tone. “And it will never be enough / To save you from the bottom of your glass.”
Perhaps not the kind of song you want to put on for the family on Christmas Eve, but there’s an element of stark truth there, and even a hint of redemption: the narrator, at least, recognizes the necessity of saving him or herself, and opts to get out. Though the holiday season is big enough for funny songs and catchy ones, moving songs and joyous ones, sometimes the sad songs are the ones that resonate the loudest.