2020 has given us a raft of holiday downers, but Julia Jacklin’s “baby jesus is nobody’s baby now” takes the proverbial cake. Inspired by the singer/songwriter’s semi-apocalyptic 2019 Christmas (Australia was on fire and she couldn’t go home), the song is equally applicable to 2020. “She lost the baby, the house nearly burnt down,” the Crushing artist begins the song. “Baby Jesus is nobody’s baby now.” After setting the tone, Julia continues to paint an extremely bleak, harrowingly relatable picture in subsequent verses.
“Watch me go to bed alone this year, there was someone I wanted but they’re no longer here,” she laments. “It’s good for your health to go to bed, sometimes, simply holding yourself.” What inspired the song? “2019 was a pretty rough one for my family,” Julia explains. “I was touring the whole year carrying a lot of guilt for not being able to be at home… I was imagining Christmas as being this time where we all came together again and took a collective breath but then the bushfires hit and my family live in the country so it was a direct threat.”
“I was living in Melbourne, still pretty new to it, and wasn’t able to go home, the roads were blocked and my family were being evacuated periodically for a month. At one point Melbourne was blanketed in smoke from the fires, the sun was this menacing red, it felt apocalyptic and pretty hopeless. I wrote this in my room looking forward to 2020, hoping it would be a reset of some kind.” Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, but it makes Julia’s depressing holiday anthem all the more timely. Watch the suitably glum visual below.