This Friday, Ingrid Michaelson is releasing a deluxe version of her 2018 Christmas album Songs of the Season, with five new tracks. One of them is “Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,” a duet with actress Zooey Deschanel, and Ingrid says she’s got Twitter to thank for that.
“I love her as an actress,” Ingrid says Zooey, who’s also one-half of the musical duo She & Him. “And Elf is one of my favorite Christmas movies, and so she’s kind of stamped in my brain as a Christmas figure. So I actually wrote on Twitter last year, ‘All I want is to write a Christmas song with Zooey Deschanel."”
“It was sort of the height of the pandemic…y’know spirits were very low and it just came to me,” she tells ABC Audio. “And she wrote back to me on Twitter, like, ‘Let’s make it happen!"”
“I was blown away that she even knew who I was and we exchanged phone numbers and she’s just, like, she is as lovely as…you would think she is,” raves Ingrid, who describes the duet as “the warm hug that we all desperately need.”
As for the rest of the new tracks, there’s “Winter Wonderland,” “Marshmellow World,” “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” and her 2019 Jason Mraz duet, “Christmas Valentine.” Ingrid says she knew from the day she released the original album that she’d do a deluxe version eventually.
“I wanted to add more [songs], but I didn’t have time,” she says of the original album. “And I knew…John Legend and Gwen Stefani and a lot of other, like, ‘Christmas heads,’ were putting out their deluxes. And so I thought, ‘Well, you know, in a few years, we’ll do a deluxe, and we’ll add some extra stuff then."”
Mission accomplished.
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