Corvair is the husband/wife duo of Heather Larimer and Brian Naubert from Portland, Oregon. They’ve recently shared the lyric video for their new original Christmas single, “I Believe in Christmas”. Originally released exclusively for Bandcamp Friday, it is now out on digital services. The song describes “a holiday that comes at the end of (yet another!) difficult year, with a narrator who is torn between cynicism and surrendering to the Christmas spirit”.
This marks the duo’s third holiday song in three years, after last year’s “Under The Tree” and 2020’s wistful “Flannel Pajamas,” which is currently featured on the double Christmas album 24 from the Indie Pop label wiaiwya Records. Next year, Corvair will be issuing a limited-edition lathe-cut Christmas EP on the UK label.
Corvair’s Heather Larimer says of the song:
Brian and I are both unabashed Christmas dorks. We love it. The rest of the year we are borderline misanthropes, but we just give ourselves over completely to hope and beauty at Christmastime. The song is about that internal tension. How you can be such a cynical adult, but it’s still impossible not to see Christmas with the eyes of a child.
The song was inspired, like all of our Christmas songs so far, by Omaha where I grew up. In Omaha, you desperately need Christmas and all of its glowing lights by the time December rolls around. The landscape is frozen solid and everything’s colorless and harsh. But that just makes all the earnest un-ironic Christmas decorations so much more magical. They feel pretty miraculous among that bleakness.
The song is also Corvair’s counterpoint to The Sonics’ “Don’t Believe in Christmas,” a Garage Rock song Brian Naubert grew up with because his father’s band The Galaxies shared a Christmas album with their Northwest contemporaries The Sonics and The Wailers where they all played on each others songs.
Naubert says:
When I was a kid we played that record in my house nonstop the whole season, and it seemed so punk of The Sonics to make fun of Christmas among all of these very sincere holiday songs. I thought of them as the bad kids on Santa’s list. So this is my anti-contrarian tribute to them.
Martin Feveyear (Mark Lanegan, Queens of the Stone Age, Brandi Carlile), mixed the song.
