“Queen of Christmas” Elizabeth Chan, who releases a holiday album each year, is out with her newest: Celebrate Me Home, named after her hit version of the Kenny Loggins classic.  Elizabeth admits she was unsure she’d make this album due to the pandemic, quarantine and the fact that she was pregnant with her second child.

“I remember I would just sit in my bed….curled up in a ball, thinking, like, ‘How am I going to record?'” she tells ABC Audio. “There was no way that I knew how to record without being in person with all of my musicians.”

But after resolving to make her album remotely, Elizabeth struggled with inspiration — until she found it in one song.

“All the songs that I tried to write were coming out really terribly,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Well, the only thing to do is listen to the Christmas music that inspires me.’ So I have a playlist of songs and one of those songs is ‘Celebrate Me Home.'”

“When I heard it for the first time after being in this, like, state of despair, I got goosebumps and I started crying,” she recalls. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, I understand the song differently now.’ And I so badly wanted to share it with the world, because I knew that this is the kind of song that people would want to hear this year.”

She was right about that, saying fans connected with the song’s video: It’s essentially her family’s quarantine diary, and even shows her giving birth to her baby daughter.

Elizabeth notes, “I literally get dozens of DMs every day from people…saying, ‘You just made me cry because this is exactly the message that people need…You’ve made me make sense of the pandemic myself during the holiday season.'”

By Andrea Dresdale
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