Olivia Rodrigo has released her first Christmas song, and its resemblance to a 1981 new wave holiday hit is no accident. Olivia Rodrigo Take Me Home (4 Christmas) arrived Thursday night with a festive music video featuring Sex and the City actor Cynthia Nixon, and within hours listeners were drawing lines between it and The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping.
The connection is deliberate. Chris Butler, who wrote the Waitresses track, said on Facebook that Rodrigo contacted him roughly two months before the release to ask for permission. He described her writing as “phenomenal” and admitted he had never heard of her before receiving what he initially took to be a prank email.
A request that looked like a hoax
Butler recounted that the message claimed to be from Olivia Rodrigo and invited him to listen to a Christmas song she had written. Unsure whether it was genuine, he looked into her career and came away impressed, citing her all-female band and her negotiation for control of her master recordings alongside her music.
He ultimately replied, posting the text of his response to his Facebook profile. In it, he thanked her for her kind words and said he liked her arrangements, her intense and poetic lyrics, and the fact that her recordings sound like real people playing together. He also accepted her invitation to hear the song.
His verdict was enthusiastic: he called the track great and suggested it could become a hit, perhaps even a contender for the UK’s annual Christmas number one. Butler does not receive a writing credit on Take Me Home (4 Christmas), because the song neither samples nor interpolates his music, despite its debt to the Waitresses’ new wave and post-punk sound.
Written last summer with familiar collaborators
Rodrigo said on social media that she wrote the song last summer with her longtime collaborator Dan Nigro and Amy Allen, who has previously contributed to tracks by Harry Styles, Sabrina Carpenter and Tate McCrae.
The lyrics center on a narrator asking her boyfriend to demonstrate real commitment by taking her to his parents’ house for the Christmas break. The video, styled to resemble a vintage home movie, follows that storyline, with Saturday Night Live cast member Ben Marshall as her feckless boyfriend and Nixon as her prospective mother-in-law.
The release lands in a crowded week for holiday music. Sam Fender has covered the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want for this year’s John Lewis Christmas advertisement, while CMAT and Elton John have teamed up for a countrified take on Step Into Christmas. Alanis Morissette is releasing an album titled Good Weather for Immaculate Conception, and Sufjan Stevens is issuing a festive compilation called Worst Christmas Ever.
Nile Rodgers and Rebecca Ferguson have covered The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire), though the pair drew criticism for using AI to create the song’s video. Kate Nash has also written Christmas Eve, a track about the night her grandparents met in Dublin.
Facing the usual chart giants
All of the new seasonal releases face the same obstacle: Wham’s Last Christmas and Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, which reliably dominate the festive charts. Both entered the UK’s Spotify top 10 on 1 November this year, two weeks earlier than in the previous year.
Wham took the Christmas number one in both 2023 and 2024, and could see a sales boost this year as fans mark the 10th anniversary of George Michael’s death. Last year’s festive chart-topper was Kylie Minogue’s XMAS.
