Darren Criss, the actor and singer who co-starred in Glee for six seasons (Kurt’s dreamboat boyfriend!) and more recently won an Emmy and several other awards for his portrayal of Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, spent the better part of last year in a studio recording holiday songs for a new album. The experience left him in an unusual frame of mind. “You know that feeling during the holidays when everything finally slows down and you really have time to think?” he said in a chat with T&C. “It’s calm but it’s also a little wistful? Well that’s how I felt for almost 12 months and it was really great.”
A Very Darren Crissmas, which debuted last week, includes a mix of familiar songs, lesser-known B-sides by his favorite artists, and one composed by him. He is accompanied in a few by Adam Lambert, Rachel Evan Wood, and Lainey Wilson. Later this year, he will embark on a multi-city tour, including dates in New York, Chicago, Boston, and others, starting on December 3.
To an outsider, making a holiday album might seem simultaneously intimidating (benchmarks already set by Bing, Dolly, Ella, Frank, Johnny, etc.) and perilous (do the job too well and you end up being played in elevators), but Criss was happy to correct musical misconceptions.
Is it hard to avoid cliches while working in this particular genre?
I’d like to offer a counterpoint to that idea. I believe Christmas albums are a wonderful excuse to embrace cliches in a way that you're not allowed to throughout the year. My general MO in life is to try to challenge people's ideas and have them reevaluate their relationship to something. You know, what can make this interesting to me in a way that also may reintroduce it to people who think they know it?
Did this require a special strategy?
I've written for a lot of different kinds of things—musicals, pop—and I'm a big believer in dressing for the party—in other words knowing what the dress code is and honoring the thing that makes it work. If you're going to a summer wedding, you wear lighter colors. There is a kind of loose dress code for Christmas albums that you don't have the rest of the year. Chords, harmonic devices, and jazz arrangements that are just a little too, I don't know, Christmas-y, but that for a handful of weeks, the rules completely change and you can run with it. Think about it, nobody rolls their eyes around Christmas and says, “Oh, you wrapped my present again.” Or, “You got a Christmas tree again.”
In what ways did you dress for this party but also make it personal?
Aside from the painfully convenient pun of my last name in the album title? No, it was the song selection. The hardest part for me was curating what songs we included. If I had my way, I would have made a whole album full of songs no one has ever heard before. But I knew I had to have pieces that people are familiar with enough to use as a gateway drug, to the other songs that I'm almost certain people have no familiarity with. So I made sure to arrange them in a way where they felt familiar when you heard them. Like, “Oh wait, is this a Frank song?”
One example is, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” This song was a novelty hit in the 1950s. It's not covered a whole lot, but when it is, it's usually by a female artist and it's done more or less exactly the same as the original record. I tried to approach it irreverently but also with a great deal of affection. You know, doing it in halftime, breaking it up with 808 beats and contemporary drum loops.
Which lesser-known song were you most delighted to reintroduce your listeners to?
I think the crown jewel of the album—and I'm very proud of all of my babies—is “New Year.” It is a Regina Spektor song from one of her seminal albums, and my longtime friend and producer Ron Fair and I were continually surprised by how much this song kind of took on a life of its own. Typically, musicians close holiday albums with a song about the New Year and usually it’s with either “Auld Lang Syne” or “What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?”
I really wanted to find a new song that could kind of maybe join that list and this one is almost bittersweet but it has this message about being extremely grateful for where we are, what we’ve been given, and being excited to get to do it again. Sonically, we kind of turned it into a '70s arena rock kind of tune. I hope people can really dial into that song because it's one of our proudest moments.
