Sam Huber and the True Groove All-Stars flip the script on traditional joyous holiday songs with an intense cover of Marvin Gaye’s controversial ‘lost’ Christmas song, ‘I Want To Come Home For Christmas’.
Originally written by Forest Hairston, as a tribute to the troops unable to make it home for the holidays, Gaye added lyrics and spun it into a mind-blowing, heart-searing missive from the perspective of a P.O.W. in Vietnam. Recorded in 1972, arguably the height of his career and his political activism, the song was so somber it didn’t see release until 1990, six years after his untimely death, when it came out (in an eerily prescient way) during the Iraq war.
Huber, an admitted Gaye fanatic, found the song and it immediately resonated with him. “It’s a serious and sad song about a prisoner of war in Vietnam, longing to spend his Christmas with his family,” he relates. “As soon as I heard it, I thought about the conflict in Ukraine and how this song is chillingly, and sadly, very timely today.” “What Marvin did on the original, the spoken word section that completely breaks the groove but then he goes right back into it, is too far ahead of its time. Not to mention that the lyrical content was way too heavy for 1972,” comments producer/arranger Tomás Doncker. “In that context, I can understand why it wasn’t released. Very few people would have gotten what he was going for. When I approached it, I realised that text, that spoken word moment, was very apt today glabally – not just with regard to Ukraine. It’s something that needed to be addressed and I applaud Sam for taking this on. Rearranging any Marvin Gaye song is daunting, there’s so much going on on multiple levels, but Sam killed it. I’ve worked with him for a long time and this is one of the most intense performances he’s done.”
Even after it was ‘buried,’ ‘I Want To Come Home For Christmas’ has become a song that would not die. It’s found multiple lives, each unfortunately connected to armed conflict, but with each rebirth, particularly now, its poignancy looms ever larger.
