Olivia Rodrigo has released "take me home (4 christmas)," her first holiday song. It was co-written by Rodrigo, Dan Nigro and Amy Allen, and comes with a music video featuring Cynthia Nixon and Saturday Night Live's Ben Marshall. The track is also being pressed on an exclusive 7-inch vinyl and cassette, both available for pre-order.
Where most Christmas pop reaches for the sleigh bells, this one leans on a violin line and a funk rhythm, and the lyric sheet does the rest. The premise is a partner's first Christmas with the in-laws, and Rodrigo plays it for the awkwardness: "I want to get drunk with your mother and father/ I'd be the coolest in-law daughter," she sings in the bridge. The video follows the same joke, with Rodrigo and Marshall at a fictional family table, Nixon cast as his mother, and the camera finding the small humiliations of a holiday visit.
Nixon, who spent years as Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City, gives the video a specific comic register, and Marshall brings the sketch-comedy timing of SNL to the boyfriend role. Rodrigo has spent this year building a public world around her records through collaborators and formats, from the "expectations" remix with Chappell Roan to the Brooklyn punk duo Venus Twins, who appeared in a recent video. A holiday single with a physical pressing fits that pattern: a small, self-contained release treated as an occasion.
The timing lands mid-tour. Rodrigo is on "The Unraveled Tour," the North American run behind her third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, with dates still ahead in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Orlando, Nashville, Vancouver, Seattle, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Brooklyn. A Christmas song released in November, while she is still playing arenas, is a strange kind of gift: something for the tour bus and the family stereo at once.
Listen for the violin, which carries the melody in place of the usual seasonal chime, and for the bridge, where the joke sharpens into a real wish about being accepted by someone else's family. Rodrigo's catalog runs on that kind of specificity, and here it arrives wrapped in tinsel. The 7-inch and cassette put the song in your hands, where a Christmas single has always belonged.
