New track extends Bridgers’ run of somber holiday-song activism
Singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has continued her run of somber Christmas-song activism by dropping a cover of the Handsome Family’s 2000 song “So Much Wine.”
Each holiday season since 2017, when Bridgers released a cover of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” the artist has shared her take on a Christmas classic. This year the proceeds will go to the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
Bridgers’ melancholic, acoustic or stripped-down covers act as counterprogramming of sorts against the blizzard of cheery, maximalist holiday music.
Bridgers anchors the “So Much Wine” cover with her signature folksy acoustic guitar. Her vulnerable, empathetic vocals match the sorrowful lyrics of the song, written by Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, in which the speaker laments a loved one’s battle with alcohol addiction.
“I had nothing to say on Christmas Day/ When you threw all your clothes in the snow,” the song begins.
Then in the song’s chorus and emotional high point — swelling with harmonies, with a fiddle riffing and percussion thumping — Bridgers offers an impassioned plea: “Listen to me, butterfly/ There’s only so much wine/ That you can drink in one life/ But it will never be enough/ To save you from the bottom of your glass.”
The track features backup vocals from Bridgers’ boyfriend, actor Paul Mescal. Offering additional vocals, fiddle and whistling is singer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird, who also played violin on the Handsome Family’s
2000 album “In the Air,” which includes the original “So Much Wine.”
The Handsome Family’s music has been described as Gothic country, colored by macabre storytelling. Sparks, one half of the husband-wife duo, described its music to NPR in 2016 as “catharsis” and “a safe place to experience really terrifying things.”
Bridgers’ music seems to flow seamlessly from such meditations on the grim. She said earlier this year that she “learned that there can be fun in the darkness.”
In more recent years, as Bridgers began committing the proceeds of her annual holiday releases to various nonprofit organizations, her covers grew more terse and politically charged.
In 2019, she, Fiona
Apple and Matt Berninger dropped a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 song “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.” Bridgers sings the Christmas hymn over news-radio programming of various currents events, such as legal opposition to abortion access, the opioid epidemic and the murder of Botham Jean, a Black
man who was shot and killed inside his own apartment by a white, off-duty Dallas Police Department patrol officer, Amber Guyger. The proceeds of that year’s track went to Planned Parenthood.
Last year, Bridgers covered Tom Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow,” a song told from the perspective of a soldier returning from war who is grappling with having killed people for his country. Proceeds benefited the Local Integration & Family Empowerment Division of the International Institute of Los Angeles, which supports immigrants, refugees and low-income workers.
The organization at the center of this holiday’s release, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, is a nonprofit that assists people each month with services that include medical care, senior services, homeless-youth housing and legal services, and is one of the few federally qualified health centers with providers who specialize in primary care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gendernonconforming people and people living with HIV.