Portland's Corvair Release New Holiday Single 'I Believe In Christmas'

Portland-based indie pop band, Corvair is pleased to share their new original Christmas single, "I Believe In Christmas." The song debuted this week at Christmas A Go Go and is available now on Bandcamp and on YouTube. The song will be on Spotify and Apple Music on December 15 or any playlist shares.

"I Believe In Christams" describes a holiday that comes at the end of (yet another!) difficult year, with a narrator who is torn between cynicism and surrendering to the Christmas spirit.

Corvair's Heather Larimer says of the song: "Brian and I are both unabashed Christmas dorks. We love it. The rest of the year we are borderline misanthropes, but we just give ourselves over completely to hope and beauty at Christmastime. The song is about that internal tension. How you can be such a cynical adult, but it's still impossible not to see Christmas with the eyes of a child."

Larimer adds, "The song was inspired, like all of our Christmas songs so far, by Omaha where I grew up. In Omaha, you desperately need Christmas and all of its glowing lights by the time December rolls around. The landscape is frozen solid and everything's colorless and harsh. But that just makes all the earnest un-ironic Christmas decorations so much more magical. They feel pretty miraculous among that bleakness."

The song is also Corvair's playful counterpoint to The Sonics' "Don't Believe in Christmas," a garage rock song Naubert grew up with because his father's band The Galaxies shared a (now-iconic) Christmas album with their Northwest contemporaries The Sonics and The Wailers where they all played on each other's songs.

Naubert says, "When I was a kid we played that record in my house nonstop the whole season, and it seemed so tough of The Sonics to make fun of Christmas among all of these very sincere holiday songs. I thought of them as the bad kids on Santa's list. So this is my anti-contrarian tribute to them."

Later this month Corvair will release a traditional yule-log inspired lyric video for the song, featuring footage of a cozy fire burning paired with vintage-style titles. This is the duo's third holiday song in three years, after last year's "Under The Tree" (which Brooklyn Vegan called "a truly pretty holiday original") and 2020's more wistful "Flannel Pajamas," which is currently featured on the double Christmas album 24 on the notable indie pop label wiaiwya Records, out of London. Next year, Corvair will be issuing a limited-edition lathe-cut Christmas EP on the UK label.

On "I Believe in Christmas," Naubert wrote most of the music and played all of the instruments. Larimer takes the vocal lead and created the story, melody, and lyrics. Martin Feveyear (Mark Lanegan, Queens of the Stone Age, Brandi Carlile), mixed the song.