Sufjan Stevens has released "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)," his first Christmas song in 15 years and his first new track since the deaths and illness that pulled him off the road. The song arrives today; the compilation it belongs to, Worst Christmas Ever!, follows on November 6 through Asthmatic Kitty.
Holiday music was once a cottage industry inside Stevens' catalog. He put out two separate five-EP box sets of Christmas material, in 2006 and 2012, then turned his attention elsewhere. Worst Christmas Ever! gathers highlights from those releases onto one disc, and the new song sits among them as the only fresh cut. Its lyric is an apology delivered at the wrong end of the year: a misanthropic man asking forgiveness for "all the funny things I've said and done," seeing darkness when he wakes and recompense in the future tense. In a statement, Stevens framed the record around that gesture. "I love the idea of a Christmas apology," he said. "'I'm sorry' is the ultimate ice-breaker in a moment of conflict, contention, and misunderstanding." He called the song "a prayer."
The video, directed by Stevens, borrows from the mixed-media animation of Leesa Allmond. Six thousand stills were printed and hand-painted by Stevens, Michael O'Neal, Cubby Graham and Hannah Cohen, then re-scanned to build the overlay effect. That method suits a songwriter who has always worked at the scale of the handmade object, and it gives the song a texture to match its plainspoken plea.
Stevens had not toured since 2016 or appeared onstage since 2018 before joining Meg Lui's band at the September release show for Instant Validation, the album he produced. Since the death of his partner and a bout of Guillain-Barré syndrome that left him unable to walk, his return has come in steps: production work, a guest turn on Jan St. Werner's forthcoming record, and now a Christmas song that asks, in its own words, whether it gets much worse.
Listen for the line "don't put it past the Earth to get better in the end." It is the closest thing to a chorus here, and the one place where the apology turns outward. ROMBO's earlier coverage of the compilation traced the archive; this song is the part of it written after everything changed.
