Darlene Love won’t ever cease considering of her vacation basic, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” At this time of yr, she could not if she tried.
“The post office, grocery store, elevator,” she says with fun, itemizing a number of places the place she retains listening to the tune. “It just feels funny that my song is in that many places at Christmastime.”
Her signature tune, first launched in 1963, is as set within the pantheon as such predecessors as Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and such successors as Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Love sang “Christmas” for years on David Letterman ‘s late evening present, which resulted in 2015, and has since adopted with appearances on “The View” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the place she’s going to carry out on Dec. 18, together with Steve Van Zandt and former Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer amongst others.
Interviewed on the Sony Music Entertainment places of work simply off Madison Square Park, the 84-year-old Love has a youthful, open-hearted spirit that makes you imagine she might escape at any time into the joyous roar of “Christmas,” or “He’s a Rebel,” “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” and different showcases. Revered by generations of musicians, Love was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011 and was among the many singers featured two years later within the Oscar-winning documentary, “Twenty Feet from Stardom.”
She was born Darlene Wright in Los Angeles, a minister’s daughter who had been performing in entrance of individuals for years earlier than Phil Spector signed her up in 1962. He renamed her “Darlene Love” and launched her profession as a lead and backing singer whose mighty mezzo-soprano was greater than equal to the producer’s booming orchestrations, what he known as “little symphonies for the kids.”
When Spector determined to document an album of Christmas music, he featured Love on oldies (“White Christmas” and “Marshmallow World”) and the unique composition that grew to become her trademark: “Christmas” was conceived by Spector and one of many nice songwriting groups of the period, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Love questioned the entire thought of a “rock n roll Christmas song,” however remembered a transcendent, exhausting session, and the problem of constructing a summertime studio gathering really feel like winter.
“What Phil Spector did was he went out and got Christmas lights and a Christmas tree and made it freezing cold in the studio,” she says. “I told him ‘You can’t do that because that’s going to close up all our throats if you make it that cold in here.’ So the only thing we had left were the lights and everybody was in a great mood.”
Love had a troubled relationship with Spector nicely earlier than his mercurial persona turned deadly and he was convicted in 2009 for the homicide of actor Lana Clarkson. (Spector died in jail in 2021). The producer infuriated Love quickly after they started working collectively when he recorded her singing “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” and, with out telling her, launched it as a single by one other Spector act, the Crystals. In the Nineties, she sued Spector for unpaid royalties for numerous songs and obtained $250,000.
But throughout her interview, she spoke warmly of Spector, recalling how she would tease him about his hairpiece and his elevated footwear, or refuse to sing one other take when she was certain she had finished it proper. Love was in her early 20s on the time however was married (her first of three), with a younger son and located herself appearing as elder sibling and protector for 2 youngsters who would develop into iconic in their very own proper — the producer’s future spouse, Ronnie Spector, then referred to as Ronnie Bennett; and the shy, however robust future spouse of session man Sonny Bono, Cher.
As Cher wrote in her eponymous 2024 memoir, and Love confirms, Darlene Love was unafraid to problem the boys within the room. During breaks between classes, she would exit for hamburgers throughout the road and convey Cher and Bennett together with her, detached to the objections of their controlling boyfriends. “Come on, let’s go do this. Let’s go do this,” she remembered urging her associates. “I was always getting everybody in trouble.”
Love and Cher have labored collectively usually. Cher sang backing vocals on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and Love has backed Cher on tour. A few years in the past, Cher was recording a Christmas album and phoned Love, hoping she would be a part of her on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” They grew up collectively in present enterprise, however Love at first did not acknowledge the well-known voice on the opposite finish of the connection.
“We talk to each other like maybe twice a year, and our careers went in totally and completely different avenues,” Love says. “So Cher calls and says, ‘Hey, doll.’ That’s what she calls me. She said, ‘This is Cher.’ And I said ‘Who?’ She said, ‘Cher, bitch!’ So I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is you. What’s up?’”
“A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector,” now considered a landmark, additionally options such long-running favorites because the Ronettes’ “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Frosty the Snowman” and the Crystals’ “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” But the album was initially well-known for its tragic timing; the discharge date was Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “A Christmas Gift” would take years to completely catch on, whereas “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” solely grew to become a perennial on Letterman’s present within the Nineties.
Love thinks “Christmas” endures as a result of it is easy to sing (though attempt singing it like her) and since the phrases will be about anybody, a lover, “a sister who got lost, or somebody who passed.” Asked if there was one other vacation tune she’d prefer to carry out as usually as “Christmas,” she rapidly solutions, “Silent Night.”
“It’s one of those songs that makes you feel good, and can make you feel sad, too,” she defined. “Because you are speaking about evening, and also you’re speaking a few silent evening, however a transparent evening, the place you’ll be able to see all the celebrities.
“And you never know how many stars are in the sky. Somewhere in the mountains where it’s black-dark. And it’s millions and millions and millions of stars. So when you say ‘Silent night, holy night,’ you’re talking about stars.”
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