Brookfield, Nova Scotia singer-cellist, Anne Janelle, is spicing up your Holiday playlist with something a little unorthodox. Rather than the traditional approach of spreading joy and mirth throughout the holidays, she’s chosen to embrace the reality of the season through darkness. Her performance of the ancient Christmas Carol “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” takes a decidedly moody tone; fitting for the cold, barren, sunless months ahead of us.
‟I want people to know that they can legitimately experience a wide pallet of emotions during the holiday season,” says Janelle. “It’s necessary, even. I think the older one gets, the more complex these emotions can become and Christmas has a way of bringing it all to the fore. In one, big messy surge.”
Janelle is, of course, not the first artist to take this approach. There are plenty of fine examples in the category of Christmas blues. Elvis’ “Blue Christmas,” a tale of unrequited love, is easily on the lighter side of the available spectrum. Wham!’s “Last Christmas” is about betrayal, Marvin Gaye’s “I Want to Come Home for Christmas” is a song about being a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Prince’s “Another Lonely Christmas” is about his lover dying on Christmas day, and Simon And Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” is the day’s grim headlines being read over the classic carol.
Blue-tinged Christmas songs have been sneaking their way into the canon for decades, but Janelle’s version of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” is a throwback all the way to the late 16th century. Taken from the German hymn “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” (“It is a rose that has sprung up”), Janelle sings of birth of Christ, with Mary in the forefront, and uncertainty that her uniquely challenging role brings.
“This has been a challenging year for me so this music comes from a very tangible place of sadness,” says Janelle. “I hope that my version of ‘Lo, How a Rose’ will resonate with others who feel blue at any point this Christmas. We might be incapacitated, overwhelmed, disappointed. Traditions change, people move on, children grow up. But there is always music. Recently, when my heart has been heavy, I’ve sung ‘Lo, How a Rose’ to myself, and it feels like pulling a warm blanket over me on a dark, east-coast-stormy night.”