Darlene Love will never stop thinking of her holiday classic, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” At this time of year, she couldn’t if she tried.
“The post office, grocery store, elevator,” she says with a laugh, listing a few locations where she keeps hearing the song. “It just feels funny that my song is in that many places at Christmastime.”
Her signature song, first released in 1963, is as set in the pantheon as such predecessors as Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and such successors as Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Love sang “Christmas” for years on David Letterman ‘s late night show, which ended in 2015, and has since followed with appearances on “The View” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where she will perform on Dec. 18, along with Steve Van Zandt and former Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer among others.
Interviewed at the Sony Music Entertainment offices just off Madison Square Park, the 84-year-old Love has a youthful, open-hearted spirit that makes you believe she could break out at any time into the joyous roar of “Christmas,” or “He’s a Rebel,” “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” and other showcases. Revered by generations of musicians, Love was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011 and was among the singers featured two years later in the Oscar-winning documentary, “Twenty Feet from Stardom.”
She was born Darlene Wright in Los Angeles, a minister’s daughter who had been performing in front of people for years before Phil Spector signed her up in 1962. He renamed her “Darlene Love” and launched her career as a lead and backing singer whose mighty mezzo-soprano was more than equal to the producer’s booming orchestrations, what he called “little symphonies for the kids.”
When Spector decided to record an album of Christmas music, he featured Love on oldies (“White Christmas” and “Marshmallow World”) and the original composition that became her trademark: “Christmas” was conceived by Spector and one of the great songwriting teams of the era, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Love questioned the whole idea of a “rock n roll Christmas song,” but remembered a transcendent, exhausting session, and the challenge of making a summertime studio gathering feel like winter.
“What Phil Spector did was he went out and got Christmas lights and a Christmas tree and made it freezing cold in the studio,” she says. “I told him ‘You can’t do that because that’s going to close up all our throats if you make it that cold in here.’ So the only thing we had left were the lights and everybody was in a great mood.”
Standing up to Spector
Love had a troubled relationship with Spector well before his mercurial personality turned lethal and he was convicted in 2009 for the murder of actor Lana Clarkson. (Spector died in prison in 2021). The producer infuriated Love soon after they began working together when he recorded her singing “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” and, without telling her, released it as a single by another Spector act, the Crystals. In the 1990s, she sued Spector for unpaid royalties for various songs and received $250,000.
But during her interview, she spoke warmly of Spector, recalling how she would tease him about his hairpiece and his elevated shoes, or refuse to sing another take when she was sure she had done it right. Love was in her early 20s at the time but was married (her first of three), with a young son and found herself acting as elder sibling and protector for two teenagers who would become iconic in their own right — the producer’s future wife, Ronnie Spector, then known as Ronnie Bennett; and the shy, but tough future wife of session man Sonny Bono, Cher.
As Cher wrote in her eponymous 2024 memoir, and Love confirms, Darlene Love was unafraid to challenge the men in the room. During breaks between sessions, she would go out for hamburgers across the street and bring Cher and Bennett with her, indifferent to the objections of their controlling boyfriends. “Come on, let’s go do this. Let’s go do this,” she remembered urging her friends. “I was always getting everybody in trouble.”
Love and Cher have worked together often. Cher sang backing vocals on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and Love has backed Cher on tour. A couple of years ago, Cher was recording a Christmas album and phoned Love, hoping she would join her on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” They grew up together in show business, but Love at first didn’t recognize the famous voice on the other end of the connection.
“We talk to each other like maybe twice a year, and our careers went in totally and completely different avenues,” Love says. “So Cher calls and says, ‘Hey, doll.’ That’s what she calls me. She said, ‘This is Cher.’ And I said ‘Who?’ She said, ‘Cher, bitch!’ So I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is you. What’s up?’”
A slow path to the top
“A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector,” now regarded as a landmark, also features such long-running favorites as the Ronettes’ “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Frosty the Snowman” and the Crystals’ “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” But the album was originally famous for its tragic timing; the release date was Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “A Christmas Gift” would take years to fully catch on, while “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” only became a perennial on Letterman’s show in the 1990s.
Love thinks “Christmas” endures because it’s easy to sing (although try singing it like her) and because the words can be about anyone, a lover, “a sister who got lost, or somebody who passed.” Asked if there was another holiday song she’d like to perform as often as “Christmas,” she quickly answers, “Silent Night.”
“It’s one of those songs that makes you feel good, and can make you feel sad, too,” she explained. “Because you’re talking about night, and you’re talking about a silent night, but a clear night, where you can see all the stars.
“And you never know how many stars are in the sky. Somewhere in the mountains where it’s black-dark. And it’s millions and millions and millions of stars. So when you say ‘Silent night, holy night,’ you’re talking about stars.”
