Baby, Please Come Home
An icon and the longing of Christmas
Two words: Darlene Love.
Hold on to those. Bookmark ‘em. We’ll get back to them. They’re the ones that make this sing, literally. That elevate any of this beyond just run-of-the-mill Christmasery.
But first:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a line in Tom Waits’ song “The Fall of Troy.” He’s talking, as Tom does, about loss and about some real-life-but-still-operatic-tragedy and he sings, “It's hard to say grace and to sit in the place of someone missing at the table.” I feel like, emotionally-speaking, I’m constantly setting a place for Elijah as is done at Passover Seder, except it’s for my brother Ben or any of my grandparents or dear friends like Pat and others who are gone and not coming back. Someone “missing at the table.” It can be any random event, but it especially sinks its teeth into me at the holidays.
The holidays (Christmas, in my case) are such a beautiful and unique and weird and sweet and melancholy time. All at once, I can be filled with overwhelming nostalgia for the Christmases of yore (I’ve even felt nostalgia for a Christmas WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING; weird, I know) while also filling me (or you) with sadness for any number of reasons—who’s not here anymore? Where and when did you lose the magic? Why can’t I just be happy? Where am I on my spiritual/religious journey and how does that affect Christmas? Or maybe the sadness is rooted in the fact that Christmas never had any of that for you, which is true for many, I’m sure. I’m lucky to have about as fond memories of Christmas as one can have, even counting the year Santa dropped off a pull-up bar instead of the requested synthesizer. #firstworldproblems
The combination of all of these feelings—the happy and sad, the joyful and triumphant and melancholy—often collide in one feeling: longing. Could be longing for a sweet nostalgic past. Could be longing for a sweeter present. Could be a longing for a something (Red Ryder BB gun!) or a someone. Longing can and does go any of many directions. It’s what I feel when I listen to a lot of my favorite Christmas music, especially Vince Guaraldi’s work for A Charlie Brown Christmas and Low’s Christmas album. The musicians seem to understand and articulate the duality of the season. And its inherent longing. It’s adjacent, and this is a topic for another day, to why I love gospel music sung from the side of the sinner rather than religious music sung piously. Not an arrival. A journey. There’s a longing in there.
That’s where “(Christmas) Baby, Please Come Home” enters.
My first listen to the song was the U2 version from 1987. (I’m currently listening to Bono’s memoir Surrender, so maybe that explains all the U2 that’s sneaking into these writings. They were formative for me in big, deep, emotional ways, so it all makes sense, I suppose.) I have this weird talent for getting gatewayed into soul music via ultra-vanilla whitebread ways. I first heard (and fell in love with) the spiritual “Go Tell It On The Mountain” not from a southern gospel choir or Mahalia Jackson, but on the tv drama “Little House On The Prairie.” And in the case of this song, I didn’t hear the classic Darlene Love version first. Nope. Like I said, I first heard it through some lily-white Irish dudes. To this day, I stand by Bono’s improvised descending melody at the end “BAAABY, PLEASE COME HOME.” He’s no Darlene Love. I see that now. But that version got me here, to the real deal. (And it’s far less vanilla whitebread than Death Cab For Cutie’s flat reading of the song. Eesh. And this is coming from someone who has loved and defended Death Cab on many an occasion!)
Just last weekend, I got to play a quiet, acoustic version of this song on a beautiful night at Velour Live Music Gallery in Provo, as part of their annual two-night All-Star Christmas shows. Last year, I played Joni Mitchell’s “River” (which is a Christmas song just like Die Hard is a Christmas movie; no need to start a fight you can’t possibly win) and each year I’ve wanted to try not to just do some Lower Lights song I’ve always sung and could recite in my sleep. So I picked a song The Lower Lights have done but which I’ve personally never sung. I detuned a few strings and melancholied it up (or down, I guess). Like Bono, I’m no Darlene Love. I wasn’t gonna out-soul her. So slower and quieter was my only move.
Here’s the embarrassing, mumbling-the-wrong-words voice note of me, finding my way towards the arrangement (including Bono’s descending melody!), if you’re interested in works-in-progress.
TIL (today I learned, for those who, like me, may have to look up modern acronyms), that the songwriters behind “(Christmas) Baby, Please Come Home) were the same ones who basically defined the sound of the early-60s Girl Groups: Ellie Greenwich, her then-husband Jeff Barry, and producer/gun-nut Phil Spector. These writers were absolute legends, writing “Be My Baby” and “Then He Kissed Me” and “Chapel of Love” and “River Deep-Mountain High”... just for starters.
As a songwriter, I geek out on the setups (and subsequent payoffs/twists) of the song and how the verses take some of the tropes/cliches of Christmas songs and tweak them to make their point. A well-trod path of songwriters, sure. But that’s only because when it works, it really works.
Let’s take a look. *pretends to move over to the telestrator*
The snow's coming down
I'm watching it fall
Lots of people around
Baby, please come home
FIRST VERSE: Snow consistently comes through as one of the signifiers of a great Christmas. (see also: White Christmas, Let It Snow, Winter Wonderland) If it snows, you’re halfway to a classic Christmas. So, the first verse tells us, yes, it’s snowing and, yes, our narrator sees said snow—all very promising so far—but, no, no amount of snow matters if you’re not here. The snow is letting our narrator down. Leaving her cold.
The church bells in town
All ringing in song
Full of happy sounds
Baby, please come home
SECOND VERSE: Another icon of Christmas: bells (see also: I Heard The Bells, Carol of the Bells, Bells Are Ringing) The bells are indeed ringing! They’re happy, even! But, again, our narrator is not happy as long as “baby” doesn’t come home.
They're singing "Deck The Halls"
But it's not like Christmas at all
'Cause I remember when you were here
And all the fun we had last year
THE CHORUS: She hears them singing “Deck The Halls” but this version? This isn’t it. Without “baby”, it’s just noise. (I tried to write a song to say a similar thing with “Stupid Little Things”, though surprisingly it wasn’t quite as big a hit.) Songwriting nitpick sidetone: “all the fun we had last year” feels a little throwaway to me. It probably helps the song be more universal and not just romantic, but it feels phoned in (said the unknown songwriter to the hall of famers).
Pretty lights on the tree
I'm watching them shine
You should be here with me
Baby, please come home
THIRD VERSE: Lights are everywhere—rain gutters, window frames, businesses, light posts. And of course, the lights on the Christmas tree. They’re shining! It should be all magic and light and love. But, our narrator reiterates, it sucks looking at them by myself. Might as well be dark.
The first three verses, she keeps it reasonably together. She’s ticking down the list of iconic Christmas stuff before realizing how none of it feels right without the one she loves. And in the fourth verse? She caves. No more tinsel-y veneer. It’s too much. The dam breaks.
If there was a way
I'd hold back this tear
But it's Christmas day
Please please please please
Baby, please come home
FOURTH VERSE: Fine. Now she’s crying on Christmas Day. Are you happy, “baby”? Why aren’t you here? Want her to beg? How about a thousand “please”s? There you go and, still, you’re not here?!?
Now, back to those first two words: Darlene Love. Her vocal performance is one for the ages. Power and magic and hope and hurt and nostalgia and longing are all packed in there, just like Christmas.
She performed the song for years and years, every Christmas season, on the David Letterman Show. Letterman himself dubbed her “The Christmas Queen.” Here’s a great supercut of some of those performances.
In her early career, Love was a huge piece of producer/jailbird Phil Spector’s legendary Wall of Sound. She got her 10,000 hours in singing backup (as part of the group The Blossoms) for songs like “Be My Baby” (Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy called this the greatest song ever), “The Monster Mash” (Tweedy has not weighed in on this one’s merits), “The Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)”, “Da Doo Ron Ron” and Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special, among a whole slew of other iconic performances. Love was always part of the elite supporting cast, but “(Christmas) Baby, Please Come Home” represents what happens when you put her center stage. She owned every inch of it. And then some.
No Darlene Love. No timeless Christmas classic. Bono does fine. Ben Gibbard was ok. Mariah Carey and Michael Buble, both singers of the ultra-performative modern American Idol ilk, took their swings. But the song lives on because Darlene Love sings the ever-loving crap out of it. Period.
Just listen to her go. (Spotify, Apple Music)
You don’t, even for a second, question her longing. Or yours, for that matter.