Singer-songwriter Elizabeth Chan set yet another benchmark in the annals of holiday music by issuing her 14th straight annual Christmas release, “Shatterproof,” this month. No one is likely to come close to shattering that record for the highest number of consecutive seasonal albums or EPs, but Chan — who is known for having a claim on the “queen of Christmas” title — dealt with plenty of events in the past year that put some cracks in her mostly cheerful holiday façade.
Most impactfully, she was undergoing grief over the death of a close friend, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), this past spring, as well as her grandmother last December. Chan was also still dealing with a severe spinal injury and a special needs court. And as recently as last week, she was back in court. No, not with any continuation of her headline-making legal battle over Mariah Carey’s unsuccessful attempt to trademark the “queen” moniker, but another lawsuit that has made the New York City news — a suit aimed at ending New York City’s attempt to impose congestion pricing on visitors to Manhattan, with rerouted traffic she believes would affect the health of children in her neighborhood.
‘Tis the season to make carefree Christmas records, right?
The “Shatterproof” EP isn’t nearly as heavy as all those circumstances might make it sound. In fact, one of the five songs is a belated commercial release of her novel version of “Jingle Bells,” set to the tune and style of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” something she only ever put out as a music video nine years ago. The self-professed Swiftie’s homage is something that dates back to a lighter-hearted era. But everything on the EP has some connection, however tangential, to the grief she fought to get past this year.
“I have the benefit and the honor to share where I am through my albums,” Chan says, “and I think ‘Shatterproof’ was definitely the absolute perfect way to describe so many things that I’ve experienced. I’m always ruminating on Christmasy words and phrases, and during the season there’s always a focus on the word shatterproof, right? And for me, actually it was a year ago today that I found out my grandmother passed away, when I was actually on a live interview in New Zealand. And then unexpectedly losing Morgan Spurlock, who I know was a controversial figure… I wished my heart was shatterproof, and it was definitely the context in which I approached all my music this year.”
Chan has a bit of hesitancy in talking about Spurlock, who pretty much withdrew from the film business and public life generally in 2017 after releasing a publicly unprompted statement admitting that he had been guilty of sexual misconduct in the past. Chan says she only ever saw an honorable side of the director, who helped start her out on the path to perennially making Christmas music by casting her on his documentary show “The Failure Club” and giving her a hard deadline to begin pursuing her holiday songwriting dream. She says he encourated her not to publicly mention their friendship, lest she be tarred by association with the controversy… and then he died of cancer this past May, leaving young children around the age of Chan’s own.
“He’s known to many as this one person, but for me, I wouldn’t even be sitting where I am today if he didn’t have this astounding belief in me as a Christmas artist. He saw this before I even could see myself, and you and in and in every industry, you always need that one mentor or you just need that one person to believe in you to help you carry through your days. And this is the first Christmas where I’m not joking around with him about it.
“When he was going through his worst times in his career, I gave him a safe space to focus on the things that he looked towards, which was being a father to sons,” says Chan. “And that’s how we connected further. Obviously I met him when he was in his heyday of being this Oscar-nominated documentary director, in the beginning of my career when I had no Christmas music. And when his career had this tremendous implosion, I gave him a safe space to kind of think about Christmas and family and home, and we reconnected. He reemerged a different person, but he was always my friend. And it’s hard because the dichotomy of how people experience relationships and stuff is complicated, and I never could understand why he said he was ‘part of the problem’” in his apologetic statement, though she had to accept everything he said.
So one of the songs on the EP that has a Spurlock connection, in her mind, is “The Thanksgiving Song.” That’s the tune she wrote to meet the challenge in the docu-series back in 2011.
“Our group, which was called the Failure Club, was a group of seven strangers who got together to try to achieve our own life’s goals. So he gave me a deadline of one week to learn how to play guitar and share my first Christmas song in the next meeting. And it was all real. This was not made up. But I was too afraid to mess up a Christmas song. So I was like, what’s the next closest holiday I could approach? And so it was a Thanksgiving song. It’s wild because it was all documented.”
The song that opens the EP, “A (Metal) Christmas Song,” is a (yes) metal-flavored version of a song she previously recorded. (She tried to get Metallica’s attention, to record the tune with her, and had no luck with that, but found her way to a suitable arrangement anyway.)
“When Morgan passed away, I asked his family what his favorite Christmas song was, and his brother said, ‘Oh, it was your song’ — ‘A Christmas Song.’ So I did a metal version for him. And I said, ‘Besides my song, what is the song that your mom would always play for you, growing up?’ And they said it was ‘Mary, Did You Know?’ So I listened to the song through the lens of a mother who just lost her son, and I saw it in a different light, , and I sang my heart out on that song. Every nanosecond in the studio, I just poured out all of my grief and all of my wonder about being a mom and giving birth to children and wondering what their legacy would be.”
Chan adds, “This album’s really a gift to his family and a commemoration of our friendship. It’s hard for me to believe that he’s gone, to be honest. It’s a very different time to have Christmas continue without the people that you love. I mean, this is something I always talk about and I write about. But when I experience it, it doesn’t make it easier.
“Also I try to also be grateful for the blessings that I do have. So I did a song with my daughters again, with my 3-year-old finally mustering up the courage to sing in the microphone. Every year on my album, you get to hear my daughters grow up, and it’s astounding how you can hear how their enunciations and their singing changes, and that becomes a new tradition for me too. So even though there’s loss, there’s also so much to experience and enjoy and gain in the bittersweetness of the season.”
As for the far-from-bitter Swift tribute, “We’re Swifties in my household,” Chan says, “and that’s definitely my favorite song. I did this homage during Halloween a few years ago where I just completely recreated the ‘Shake It Off’ music video, Christmas-style, with even a nativity scene. I’ve never released that song before and I’m like, if I don’t release it this year, the year of Taylor Swift, when would I? So I thought it was well-curated to throw it into the mix.”
Chan has signed to do a feature film documentary about her life and career, though she’s waiting till 2025 to reveal details.
“It’s based on 14 years of archival footage that I have collected since the very beginning, which was something that Morgan told me to do. We were always gonna do something together. It’s like when I had this idea of like doing like a flash mob in Times Square [for the original “A Christmas Song” video], but I had no money and I had no way of doing it, and Morgan was like, ‘Oh, who cares? Just do it. People record stuff in Times Square all the time.’ He was pushing me over the edge to do things that were just like so crazily impossible. He had a really beautiful way of thinking about people, and I think that that will never be known. He really believed in dreams and dreamers, and I feel like that that should be more of his legacy.”
Recalling those early days of professionally realizing her Christmas music mania, she says, “It takes a certain time in your life to be like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna shut down Times Square. Yeah, I’m gonna do Christmas music. Yeah, I’m gonna walk out of my old job. In that music video, I’m literally walking out of my old job at Conde Nast on the same block. I quit my job to write Christmas music and I exited the door for the last time on that exact block and basically entered the Christmas music space. That was my entrée.”
Of Spurlock, she adds, “he filmed with me and then he went to film with One Direction [directing the group’s concert movie], and I would joke with him, ‘Oh, well, I was your starter musician.’”
She also credits Spurlock with encouraging her in her legal battle with Carey. After the pop superstar applied for a series of “Queen of Christmas” trademarks, Chan went into battle to stop that — not to claim them for herself, she says, but to leave them open for anyone who wanted to use them, whether it’s her or Brenda Lee or Darlene Love or just someone who wants to make “Queen of Christmas” Etsy gear. Chan’s side finally prevailed when Carey’s lawyers seemingly abandoned the trademark attempt and it was dismissed by a judge.
“During the Mariah stuff, which was really, really hard, I owe him because there were days where I didn’t think I could move forward because there were so many roadblocks at that time. But I always saw him as in the boxing ring with me as my coach— like ‘Get back up and keep fighting.’ I’d be in the gutter and he’d be like, ‘Fantastic. What are we gonna do today?’ I will forever be thankful because he really believed in me as the Queen of Christmas when I didn’t even see it sometimes. When the New Yorker profile came out (in 2018, with a headline proclaiming her the Queen of Christmas), he was the first person to call me and say, ‘It’s your moment.’”
Of her current legal battle, Chan says, “Last year around Thanksgiving, I filed a lawsuit against the Department of Transportation and the MTA. The reason is there is this thing called congestion pricing that’s gonna happen in New York City where they’re going to start charging visitors to come into lower Manhattan, below 60th street, a toll. It was originally $15, but now it’s $9. For me, it wasn’t about being anti-congestion pricing. Clearly when you live in a big city, traffic sucks and everyone hates it. But the problem here is that I live in an area in lower Manhattan where all of the traffic will be directed, where if you set your GPS to no tolls, you’re gonna end up in my neighborhood.
“And my daughter is special needs and has a seizure disorder, so whenever she’s sick and has a seizure, she has to be in the hospital within 15 minutes. I said to my local politicians, ‘Hey, I understand that this congestion plan is going through, but when I was reading the plan, it said that there’s gonna be more congestion in certain areas — and these areas are going cause asthma and cancer- and respiratory-related diseases to children and residents. Are you sure that’s a good idea? But more importantly, how would my child get ambulances in and out of our neighborhood if it’s going to be bumper to bumper traffic every day? And no one could give me a good answer.”
Last December was a bummer Christmas for Chan because the site The Gothamist broke the news about her lawsuit on Dec. 25, and “my phone did not stop ringing off the. I was so mad because I really wanted to be with my kids and Christmas is really still very sacred to me. And they made it a joke about my litigation chops with the Queen of Christmas trademark. But it’s not a joke.
“And look at it now. It’s the second time that I’ve helped people. I’m not getting anything in return; I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do. You want to do things that will try to mitigate hurt for people, you know? I didn’t want to sue about the Queen of Christmas either. I’m glad I did, though.”
She adds, “I’m not a lawyer. I’m like Erin Brockovich.” Or Brockovich meets Der Bingle.
